Escapist
by glasshibou
Summary: Sometimes, a nightmare lingers longer than it should.
1. Enter

It was the _books_ again, it was always the books. At the time their existence had not bothered him, but as the years dragged on and on, they became more and more aggravating. They simply appeared one day, a product of the land's last-ditch effort at a grasping for new magic—new power, as the Underground's had grown stagnant. Other kingdoms had received their own books—some monarchs found games, but they all rather suddenly woke one day to a score of them in their studies. With the books came clear instructions—distribute them in the Aboveground realm or they would be distributed for the monarch that had received them. The way the letter had been worded left a certain taste of dread in the mouths of those who had read it.

When he chose to ignore the books, the Goblin King also ignored the warnings. He held on to them for much, much longer than any of the others did, but he still had not dared to open one of the little books and read it.

One day, they disappeared without warning.

As per the warning, the book shad been distributed. The Goblin King refused to acknowledge this and chose to think that one of the maids had gotten tired of them sitting around for so long and pitched them; he chose to ignore the fact that he _himself_ had attempted to move them, determined that they would only be budged by magical means and even then refused to accept that the magic had slowly been withering away in the Underground, and the magic to move the books would be scarce.

He did not like to think that he had none to spare for such trivial tasks, did not like to see his Labyrinth crumbling around him.

So it was with surprise and more than a little jealously that he noted King Lennox's kingdom was flourishing and he had a rather young bride on his arm. She was clutching a bright blue leather-bound book.

_Perhaps_, he allowed himself to think,_ the books are a little more useful after all_. But still, he refused to entertain the notion that his had gone Aboveground.

It was not until he had felt the first summoning and returned to his castle to discover the rest of his servants transformed into stinking little pests that he decided to read one of the books. They had to be, after all, the cause of all of this. In the shaking girl's hands he had seen the red book and she clutched it wide-eyed as if it were her last connection to her pitiful life.

Now she was bumbling about his Labyrinth in a desperate attempt to _take back the child he had stolen_—which was utter rubbish, he'd never stolen any brat—but she seemed convinced enough and had even loaned him the copy of her book.

He tore through it in the thirteen hours that he had apparently allotted her, and was furious. He was, apparently, the villain in this quaint little story, bound to love the heroine until she took back her child (or little brother or sister, he would later learn) and left him.

The Goblin King was not amused.

The first girl won, and he was glad to have the spell broken when she returned home. In fact, he was so eager for her to leave he might have… hurried the process along, given her an out that nullified the entire deal. But she was gone and he could finally get her face from his mind, and all would be good. Perhaps now that the book was returned the magic would come rushing back and the rest of his servants would be returned to normal. Much to his dismay they had numbed their confusion with the ale that they had begun to brew. It was nasty stuff and a common sight to see a heap of goblins sleeping off their intoxication in scattered corners of the castle.

The magic did not come back, however, no matter how many wishes were made or children were snatched or people the Goblin King had to pine for.

And it was always the same—some he let escape, as he had the first (_they_ never quite managed to capture his attention) or they lost and became trapped in the giant maze, because when he offered _(just let me rule you, and you can have everything…)_ they always looked at him, startled like rabbits out of their burrow and turned away. Or worse, they would repeat _those lines_ back to him. He'd heard them enough to know them by heart.

_Through dangers untold_—he almost laughed in their faces. Dangers, to _them?_ In _his_ Labyrinth? As if he would let any true harm come to the foolish girls.

_And hardships unnumbered…_ and they would continue without mercy until they got to the last part, the part that would release both of them.

_You have no power over me._

Then it would be done; when they lost, because most of them _did_ lose, he'd have another Junk Girl in the junkyard or a Reveler stuck in an eternal masquerade, and the brat they failed to rescue from his clutches would turn into another goblin. And he, the Goblin King, would be left to clean up the mess. He resented it all.

It wasn't until one particular frizzy-haired girl wished her newborn brother away that he thought he finally understood what the books were for. He had no heir; perhaps that was the reason for all of the children being wished away.

But no; he offered the girl a bauble to see her dreams and she let him keep the child. The curse, at least, was averted, but after thirteen hours the child was spirited back to his sister's side. The Goblin King growled in fury and shattered the crystal. Later she would not remember him, or the crystal, or his offer.

This would continue for years and years until some of the books started to look rather tattered, and the Goblin King was near the end of his rope.

Finally, the summons that brought him so frequently to the Aboveground slowed, and almost ceased. The books were brushed off by many as just another fairytale—after all, things like magic and wishes rarely came true anymore.

So why would the green-eyed girl be calling for her brother to be taken?

She called, and she _meant_ it. What's more, she called out to _him_. The script did not call for that, only that the child be wished away to the goblins. Not the Goblin King.

He flew to her, barely containing his ire, and when she had been spooked enough he burst in through her window. He appeared to her wreathed in stardust and shadows, lightning and the night wind.

_You're him aren't you, you're the…_

Goblin King.

He inclined his head slightly, ever so slightly, listened to her try to take back her words—

—_What's said is said—_

—_I didn't mean it!—_

—And then stepped back in surprise and resignation when she agreed to run the Labyrinth. She had been the first in a long, long time, and he felt the curse settle on his back, familiar like he wished it wasn't. He left her on the Endless Plains, bathed in fiery orange light, and as he faded from her view he could still catch her scent on the wind.

She made it in, which was farther than many had made it, and even found friends to help her. Friends, he noted warily, that were awfully close to her.

_And Hoggle, if she kisses you, I'll turn you into a prince._

She kissed him.

The Goblin King raged and opened the ground beneath them, dropping them right into the middle of the Bog.

Eventually, though, temptation (or hunger, but he liked to think it was temptation) led her to take the peach from the dwarf.

She stepped into the dream wearing glittering white and an expression of innocence among the decadence around her and she was _beautiful_. Though he stayed away from her directly, the Goblin King always followed her around the swinging dancers, never more than a few feet away.

Soon, she caught him directly in her gaze and let herself be trapped by his arms. She was confused, he could see, but she was _here_ and he was willing to ignore her wide, hesitant eyes for a few moments if it meant that she would not leave, or to be that much closer to accepting.

But no, she caught sight of the clock and remembered that she had to do _something_ and fled his arms, fled the grasping crowd that did what he wished he could do—hinder her, grab her, turn her around, _anything_, just to keep her.

He watched through a crystal as the Junk Lady tried to trap her with her own possessions and allowed himself a small smile when she escaped. She, _Sarah_—he rolled her name through his mouth and liked the way it sounded when he said it—would not share the same fate as some of the other, perhaps easily swayed runners.

The Goblin King watched as she joined her friends again, made it past Humongous and into the city, through the paltry forces he sent her way, and into his transformed throne room. Perhaps this one would be different, perhaps…

But no…

She made it through Escher room and when it came time, she began to say the words.

The Goblin King pleaded with her—

_Haven't I been generous? Everything that you wanted I have done, I have reordered time and I have done it all for _you—

But she opened her mouth, preparing to say the words _my will is as strong—_

And somewhere, something inside of the Goblin King snapped.

_You have no power over me_.

His face fell, he could feel it, and then _he_ fell, transforming as he went. In the few seconds before she disappeared completely, he saw Sarah reach out to the crystal he had dropped—_please please take it—_but it shattered, scattering magic over her.

As an owl he watched her call to her friends, watched them appear, and when he could take it no more he flew away.

As he flew he reached a decision. The books would go, they would _have to go_ because he could not live through it again, not when this time the Sarah-girl's face still floated through his thoughts—_scared in the oubliette, confused on the Plains, dazed in the ballroom…_

He reached his home and collapsed.

The Goblin King did not stir for three days.

While he was incapacitated, the king plotted. When he found he had the strength to move again, he sent his plans into motion.

It only took him three days to hunt down the rest of the books, but with each book he picked up he could feel the girl that had at one point owned it and wished from it (this one was from the girl with the frizzy hair, this one had thin pink lips, this one laughed the whole way through) but he did not find the book that _Sarah_ had. Of all of the faces he saw, he did not see hers.

From the books, anyway. Her voice still haunted him—_piece of cake!_—and sometimes he still felt her pull away from his grasp in the dream ballroom.

This is what leads to Goblin King to where he is now—standing beside a bonfire of red-bound books that curl at the edges. With each book that fades to ash, the memory of the girl that held it burns away too.

* * *

><p>It is <em>hot<em>. Although Sarah fled inside to the air-conditioned cool of her house she still feels the heat radiating from the sun burning the sky. Every now and then she ventures outside far enough to check the thermometer hanging just outside the kitchen door.

"It's over eighty." She tells her father sullenly when he raises a questioning brow. "And it's only nine in the morning."

"That's odd." He says, and returns to his paper.

She turns to look out the wide windows, stirring her cereal inattentively. It's not a particular flavor that she likes, but it's the only kind they have at the moment because Toby had cried when he saw the brightly colored box and would not have stopped if Karen hadn't put it in their cart at the supermarket. Sarah tears her eyes from the scenery outdoors and tries to blink away the sunspots that dance in her vision. It is almost as if she'd been staring at the sun directly.

Grumbling softly, she stands and dumps the contents of her untouched bowl unceremoniously into the trash bin beside the sink.

"Not hungry?" Her father asks from behind the sheet of newspaper.

"No." She lies.

Sarah feels like she's _starving_, but nothing she tries seems to quell her hunger. Even the sweetest of strawberries taste like sand in her mouth, and when Karen had pulled her birthday cake out of the oven last night and placed a big, sugary _Happy 17__th__!_ decoration on it she almost despaired.

From upstairs she could hear Toby crying in his crib and Karen's rapid footsteps as she made her way through the rooms to coddle him. Her father didn't seem to notice.

"I think I'm going to the park." She tells him, grabbing her sunglasses, already halfway out the door.

It takes her much longer to make it to the lush area than normal—the heat slows her down and within ten minutes of walking she has already managed to break a sweat. She wipes the back of her neck and then wipes her hand on her shorts. Sarah turns the final corner and glimpses the park; the swans are still swimming in the spacious pond, the trees are still shady, and the grass is still green, but something seems… off about the whole scene, like somebody had taken her vision and messed around with the saturation. Everything seems too _bright_. She'd think _too real_ if she didn't know it all was—_is_—real. Sarah shakes her head and clears her thoughts. It's simply much too warm to think in that manner.

Forgoing her normal spots on her favorite bench or beside the obelisk, Sarah instead chooses a slightly cooler place underneath a great oak tree right beside the water. She slides her feet out of her sandals and dunks them in the water, following the ripples with her eyes. The swans don't bother to acknowledge her presence on the other side of the pond.

Sarah rubs her ankle—the sore one, from when she fell—_no, I _tripped_; I did not fall_ she reminds herself. If she was going to lie about it, she might as well concrete it in her mind. Besides; she wanted to forget as much about _that place_ as soon as was possible.

There are little rocks at the bottom of the pond, and they're perfect for skipping. Sarah grabs a handful and throws them over the serene surface of the water, her concentration broken only by the sound of wings beating the air. She looks up only to see a familiar and unwelcome feathery sight.

"Go away." She rasps, throwing one of her smooth skipping stones at the bird. It screeches at her and she throws another, harder this time, and the rock hit its mark. With a dirty glare at the girl, the owl once again takes wing and flees the scene. A feather falls and lands in her hair, but Sarah does not notice it. Instead, she leans against the trunk of the tree she rests against and half closes her eyes.

The images of her world and another blend together.

There are pillars everywhere; everything's so dark so she can't really see where she's going. Sarah bumps into more than one person and tries to escape their grasp. They hold her tightly, too tightly and she feels like she's going to drown—claws, or sharp nails, scratch at her bare arms.

"S—stop!" She chokes out, but the shadowy figures persist.

She blinks, hard, and wakes herself from her half-sleep with a harsh cry and, looking up, notices that she must have been out of action for a few hours because the sun has changed position in the sky. She shudders, though she knows it must be around ninety degrees by now, and rubs her arms to dispel the gooseflesh. The sun seems brighter, too.

Sarah stares out across the lake—the swans have gone and she's not sure where they are—and stands slowly, feeling her muscles protest the movement. She must have been there longer than she thought.

She trudges back to her house and welcomes the air-conditioning, sighing in the sudden cool air. The colors are more muted in the artificial light, she notices, and is glad for the change. It gives her less of a headache than the sun does.

"Hello, Sarah. Back so soon?" Karen asks, pulling a pitcher of lemonade out from the refrigerator.

"It's so hot out." The girl complains, fanning herself a little to express her distaste of the heat.

"Oh, I don't think it's so bad." Her stepmother replies while pouring a glass of the sticky drink.

"It's ninety degrees!"

"It will go down; just wait. We're supposed to get a big rainstorm and that will cool everything down. And maybe that will make Toby feel better too," she muses, "all of that barometric pressure must be so _hard_ on the poor baby."

And with that, Sarah knows that she has lost whatever attention she might have gained. Though her father and stepmother needed a break from the ill child a week ago, his condition truly wasn't that bad. It had gotten worse, and with it Karen's attentions had become almost smothering. Toby still cried, but his wails had increased to almost tortured screams. He consumed what was given to him ravenously but within minutes he would cough it up; it was rare for him to keep anything down. Perhaps worst of all was that he didn't sleep. Nobody in the household had gotten a good night's rest since a day after _then_, although Sarah was the only one that counted it that way.

She wonders if he picked up some strange bug from _there_ but quickly puts the thought from her mind. Babies get sick all of the time; that didn't mean that it was otherworldly. Besides—she fought to get him back, she _earned_ him back, she fought through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered for the babe, and he was fine _then_.

Whatever bug he managed to catch, it wasn't something from _there_. It probably just _was_ the heat, or weather, like Karen thought. Something like that, something mundane, ordinary and not from _there_.

Because really, what could thirteen hours do? Toby had been kept relatively safe until she'd been able to collect him; neither of the half-siblings had been harmed, neither had formed any attachments (besides Sarah's new friends, whom she hadn't even been able to speak to after the first night) and _certainly_ neither of them had formed any sort of… attractions. Because after all, it _was_ only thirteen hours, and whatever romantic notions she had held a day or two after her return from the labyrinth had long since been removed.

The third night after her return, Sarah begins to hear something over Toby's screams. It's a strange scratching noise she's sure she hasn't quite heard before, but she doesn't investigate it; no, Sarah stays curled up on her bed, blanket drawn up just over her chin, trying to keep the shaking sight of her body from the owl peering into her window.

Owls really have no business looking like this one does—she's had ample time to study it because it's been at her window, scratching away for four straight nights now—all ghostly and vengeful, with wide, glossy black eyes staring from a pale face.

Sarah dreads the sunset. At least in the daylight the owl looks _normal_.

Upstairs, Toby's squealing stops. The sudden halt in noise is strange, and it takes Sarah quite by surprise. She has to stand at the foot of the stairs and peer up into the relative gloom for a solid minute before she understands what has happened.

Karen pushes past her and Sarah almost stumbles into the wall. Before she can even regain her footing, Karen is out of sight. A door bangs against a wall, but that is the only noise in the otherwise silent household.

"_Robert!"_ Karen shrieks, and the bottom of Sarah's stomach drops out. Something sounds _wrong_ in the woman's voice, and Sarah runs up the stairs right behind her.

The sight that awaits her in her parents' room is horrifying; Karen crouched over the little boy, crying for her husband to call an ambulance. Sarah stands in a corner, rooted to the spot, eyes wide.

"Karen," her husband asks hesitantly, standing just outside of the room, "what's wr—"

"Call an ambulance!"

"What?"

"_Call a fucking ambulance!_ He's not breathing!"

**A/N**

I've rewritten this thing about six times, and I'm still not sure if I'm quite happy with it. ):

So yeah… this is a bit different than _Sour_ in terms of genre. And rating. I'm not sure what I've gotten myself into, but here it is! Sarah's seventeen because I feel really, really uncomfortable with her being sixteen or fifteen in this fic, even though one year's difference isn't much of one.

As for updates, they won't be as rapid as _Sour_ was because this is _roughly_ nine times longer than the average chapter of _Sour_.


	2. Dirge

The ambulance comes and Sarah does her best to keep out of the way and in a corner as the paramedics swarm over her baby brother. She shakes and holds herself in a bear hug that turns her knuckles white.

They load Toby into the back of the ambulance and speed off. Robert joins his son, and Karen and Sarah follow behind in the car. It's a silent ride, broken only by car horns and the wail of the sirens in front of them. Sarah wrings her hands in the passenger seat while Karen takes turns sharply and almost runs them into another car going through a four-way intersection too slowly.

When Sarah's heartbeat reaches a more normal pace, she turns to her step-mother.

"Karen," Sarah croaks, but is cut off when Karen slams on her brakes, just barely managing to avoid running through a red light. After that, she doesn't have the courage to confess.

"Karen!" Sarah gasps when she almost speeds through another light, "Maybe I should drive, you know?"

The tires squeal as she pulls them over into a mostly-empty parking lot. Sarah and Karen switch seats, and Sarah is a much calmer driver, though her hands shake and her grip on the wheel turn her knuckles white. Karen sits in the passenger seat, and relieved of her duty, keens loudly while burying her face in her hands.

"I'm sure he's fine," Sarah babbles to fill the silence and hopefully bring some form of comfort to both herself and her stepmother, "I'm sure it's… It's just…"

Her voice cracks and she coughs.

Neither one tries to speak for the remaining minutes in the drive—the hospital isn't that far away and they've already lost sight of the ambulance, which means that Toby and Robert are both already there.

When they get there, Karen runs in while Sarah searches for a place to park. It's almost a futile attempt, but she finally finds a spot at the very, very back of the lot on the fifth floor. She runs back to the hospital's entrance, asks the receptionist where to go, and then promptly ignores her orders to cease her running. Her brother is more important than any rules—besides, it's not as if she's going to run into anybody.

Karen and Robert stand huddled together on one corner of the waiting room, in each other's arms. It's not a moment that Sarah wants to intrude upon, so she stays at the other end of the room, trying to build up her courage again. When she thinks she's feeling brave enough, she takes slow steps over to her parents.

"Did they say…?"

Robert shakes his head. Karen shudders.

"I think…" Sarah swallows, trying to steady her shaking voice, "I think this might be my fault, last week—"

"No." Karen tells her firmly. "This isn't _anybody's_ fault. Sometimes—sometimes people just get sick, and…" She hiccups lightly, "This isn't anybody's fault." She says again, squeezing her husband's hand.

Minutes that seem to drag into hours pass, and eventually one of them sits down in the uncomfortable sea-foam green waiting room chairs—Sarah can't remember who does first—and the rest follow. Sarah is glad for the seat, her knees were shaking so much that she is sure she would have fallen down had she continued to stand. On her knees, her hands curl themselves into anxious balls. Her nails dig into her skin, leaving little red half-circles that sting slightly.

Karen wrings her hands and every now and then Sarah can hear something like her knuckles cracking, and Robert rubs her shoulders in languid, absentminded circles. He also obsessively checks his watch, nervously calling out the minutes.

"It's been ten." He announces.

"Eleven." He says a minute later. Sarah wishes he would stop; the constant reminder of the passing of time sets her on edge. Just as he's about to announce that twelve minutes have passed, a doctor enters the room and makes his way over to the incomplete family. His steps seem determined but his shoulders slump.

"How is my baby, how is Toby?" Karen asks, frantic to see _somebody_ that looks official.

"He did not make it, Mrs. Williams. There were complications, and he was too young—there wasn't much hope."

Karen deteriorates into sobs, but Sarah stares wide-eyed at the doctor. He looks a little…

"What happened?" Robert asks.

"He was ill." Sarah begins to shake again; his voice sounds like…

"We know that." Robert snaps, taking a step forward. The doctor doesn't respond; instead, his eyes slide over to Sarah. She avoids eye contact, preferring to stare at her shoes.

"It seems as if he had some sort of allergy, but an autopsy would be needed to make sure."

Sarah half places the voice—the accent is only a little bit off, but… She looks up. He's got blonde hair, blue eyes, and something seems off about the left one. A small noise of panic escapes her and immediately, his attention is drawn to her.

"What of you, girl, do you have something to say?" If she was sure she wasn't being paranoid, Sarah would think that she could detect something skin to malicious glee in his voice and eyes as he continues.

"_I_ would say that it seems as if he's caught some sort of wasting sickness, but he hasn't been travelling abroad, has he?"

Karen and Robert answer in the negative, and Sarah's eyes grow wide.

"Darling, your knees are bleeding. Would you like me to get something to clean them up?" He asks, and he would sound polite if his eyes didn't narrow as if in some sort of dare.

"N—no." She chokes out. Robert speaks with the _doctor_ more and the sound of his cool replies almost drive her to madness. As it is, a throbbing headache has started up and it makes looking at light difficult. She spins around, facing away from Karen and Robert and the doctor, clapping hands on her temples. Her fingers alternate between splaying themselves out and knotting themselves in her hair.

She can hear footsteps going in the opposite direction and she can hear her father turn to face her.

"Sarah," he says in a dejected tone of surprise, "you've got a feather in your hair." He plucks it out and shows her.

Sarah tries not to gag.

* * *

><p>Nobody can quite sleep that night, and everybody sits at the kitchen table until well past midnight. There isn't a sound until Sarah pushes back her chair and slowly climbs the stairs. Her feet feel like lead and her knees ache from where she tore them open earlier. A bandage is useless now—what blood spilled has dried long ago and Sarah hasn't quite had the heart to clean it up properly. She lets it go, little short-lived dark red trails and all.<p>

Entering her room is not something that she wants to do because she _knows_ that the owl will be back, staring in with eyes like big black voids. How it even manages to stay perched on the outside windowsill is beyond her, but she isn't going to investigate. Instead, she just hopes it will fall one night and somehow break its neck.

Yes, that would suit her just fine. She wouldn't even mind if it was simply crippled.

Once again, gathering courage and steeling herself for what's ahead is difficult. After five minutes of simply standing in front of her door with her hand on the doorknob, she decides that she's simply too tired to even attempt to rally her strength and she merely walks in.

The owl is not there, for the first time in about a week. She breathes a sigh of relief and collapses on her bed. Immediately, she is asleep, and she does not dream.

When she wakes, it is to the noise of scratching. Dreading looking at her window (she knows what she'll find) she instead looks at her bedside clock. In the dark she can just make out that it's a little past three in the morning.

The scratching intensifies until she is forced to look over at her window. As soon as she does, the bird hisses and then flies away, but something seems to be left in its stead. From her vantage point curled up on her bed, Sarah can't tell what it is.

To be safe, she waits ten minutes and then slowly, cautiously makes her way over to her window. Sitting on the ledge are bandages and a little earthen pot of what seems to be some sort of salve. Sarah snarls at the owl's audacity and cracks her window open. The screen had been torn and thrown out long ago, which made pushing the objects off an easy task. The sound of breaking glass satisfies her slightly, but she knows that she'll have to clean it up in the morning.

It _can_ wait until morning though, because Sarah decides that she doesn't really fancy being dive-bombed by angry owls in the middle of the night—or early morning, as it is. Sarah stumbles back to her bed, ignoring the pain in her knee as it crashes into the mattress in the dark and manages a fitful half-sleep for four more hours.

The second time she wakes the sun has risen, and she is glad for it. Her father and Karen made it to their bed sometime last night because when she goes downstairs they're not at the table and neither one of them has started making breakfast. Sarah prepares pancake batter and leaves it in the refrigerator while she goes to clean up what she pushed off her window last night.

It's still there—some part of her had kind of been hoping that it would disappear—but with a disgruntled sigh, Sarah picks up the larger shards of glass and throws them in the outside trash can. Cleaning up whatever had been in the pot is a little trickier. She doesn't want to touch it, so she eventually hauls out the hose and sprays it away. As she's putting the hose away, the sound of wings beating the air greets her ears.

Sarah doesn't turn around, but can't help herself from stiffening.

"I hate you." She whispers, knowing the owl can her even if she doesn't turn to face it. "Go away."

The owl _hoo_'s in response and she can hear it shifting on the branch in the tree directly behind her. Vaguely, she wonders if he's _letting _her hear it, because she's sure it's something she wouldn't have heard under normal circumstances.

When she goes back inside, her father is standing over the stove, slopping the pancake batter on a hot pan. It sizzles, and Sarah rubs the back of her neck, sure that something has to be wrong.

"Hello." She says quietly, sliding into a chair behind the table. She doesn't bother to ask how he's doing.

"Karen will be down in a few minutes." He says without turning around. "Get dressed; we have to go to the funeral home today." This time he does turn around, to hand her a steaming pancake.

"Sarah! You haven't changed! And you didn't clean your cuts—go do that. You don't want to get an infection, do you?"

She shakes her head and trudges upstairs. Her first stop is the bathroom; the isopropyl alcohol stings and she grits her teeth as she applies it, dabbing away the dried blood.

In her room she closes her blinds before changing.

At the funeral home, she tries not to breathe in because breathing in means smelling the chemicals that they use for embalming. Karen and her father make all of the plans for the funeral. In a shadowed corner, Sarah sits and quietly stitches Lancelot up in large, sloppy stitches. She never did agree to let Karen teacher her how to sew.

Even Lancelot seems weak, hollow, when she holds him up for appraisal. Perhaps she should have added stuffing; that would at least make the bear look a little more alive. She isn't sure that anything can be done for the grieving adults talking with the funeral director at the cheap but official-looking table with papers strewn all over it.

They stop somewhere for lunch, but Sarah can't get the smell of formaldehyde to leave her alone. She ends up not eating her minestrone soup, but she crushes the saltine crackers served with it in their little packet and then pours it into the red liquid, completely soaking the crumbs and stirring them around until they're all mush.

"Don't play with your food." Karen murmurs. Sarah sits on her hands to keep from doing anything else, and looks out the restaurant's windows. An owl peers back at her.

* * *

><p>The funeral is something that Sarah never wants to repeat again. She stands with Robert and Karen, accepting the condolences of friends and family, some of who she's sure she's never seen before. There isn't much to say, and nobody seems willing to start a conversation.<p>

Not that she really wants one—her tongue seems thick and lifeless in her mouth and her throat is dry. Her parents probably feel the same way; there hasn't been a proper conversation in their household since Toby, so they're all a little out of practice.

Her Aunt Emily and Uncle Jack are next in line, little Jillian in tow. Sarah's little cousin is about Toby's age, only three months younger. Emily and Karen liked to meet up and complain to each other lightheartedly during their pregnancies. While Jack talks to Robert and Emily speaks with Karen, Jillian stares up at Sarah with her big blue eyes and Sarah crouches down, holding the little girl's hand.

"Hello, Jill." She manages to croak out. The little girl smiles and pats Sarah on the head before hugging her.

For the rest of the evening, the little girl sticks close to her older cousin, even when the casket enters the ground. She cries when Sarah does, but is too young to really understand why.

When other people throw roses in, Sarah throws down Lancelot. Robert squeezes his daughter's free hand—the other has been claimed by Jillian.

Soon after that, the majority of the remaining people clear out. Karen and Robert get caught up in speaking with some of the family that Sarah has never seen before, so Sarah stands by the grave and stares down. The hole won't be filled until after everybody leaves, so for now she is greeted with the sight of long-stemmed roses and a single tattered teddy bear.

Another sight greets her too; that of a far away night sky that she's sure isn't from her own world. She doesn't recognize the constellations, and she can usually manage to find at least a few. It's just like when she saw the ballroom a few days ago, superimposed with the sight of the park. Only now it's worse because the sky looks like it's moving; now she can see the tops of trees. She's seen views like these before, but only on television and usually only on nature shows, when they get a good aerial shot by putting the camera in an airplane. It's a little disconcerting to see a view like that when her feet are firmly planted on the ground and her little cousin's hand is in hers.

"Let's go, Jill." She whispers, trying to get the image of the otherworldly night sky out of her head. From above the open grave in the ground an owl stares down, and when Sarah finally manages to shake the sky from her eyes, she sees the bird.

"Jill." Sarah commands. "Let's _go_."

But the little girl does not move. Instead she claps her hands and points at the bird.

"Yes, Jillian, I see _it_ too." Sara glares at the bird and then picks the little girl up in a grip she can't wriggle out of. "But we have to go now."

She weaves in between the grave markers, but she can still feel the predatory bird's gaze on her back.

"And we're _not_ going to see it again." Sarah spits out.

The bird narrows its eyes and though both girls now ignore its silent flight, he follows them back to Sarah's house where some of the family has gathered to tell stories and remember things that might not have even happened, and generally draw the painful process out longer. Sarah really, really does not like funerals. Sarah really, really does not like being decked out in all black—it's not her favorite colors, and she doesn't feel like it really suits her, but beyond the shallower reasons, she can't shake the feeling that it's also terribly unlucky, perhaps _especially_ for her.

She knows it's probably silly, but she wants to get out of her black ensemble and into something more comfortable and preferably green as soon as possible.

It's not to be, though; "as soon as possible" happens to be three hours later when the last stragglers finally vacate her house and it isn't seen as rude to go and change. Sarah slips into her favorite pajamas, and she's careful to make sure that her blinds are still shut tight.

**A/N**

I know I told a few people that this might take a little longer to get out, but apparently, I lied. It _is_ a little shorter than the first chapter, though.

_0928soubi_: Thanks for both the review and deciding to following this story too!  
><em>Broken Memories<em>: Oh, wow! You've been cured from your lurkerdom, huh? Don't worry, sometimes I go for a while without leaving a review too, so don't feel bad about it! I'm happy that you've decided to follow this too.


	3. Interactive

She's not going insane, Sarah knows that much. That demented bird, Goblin King, man, thing, _entity_ really was following her. In the supermarket once she had passed by somebody that had the same strange, masculine lilt to their voice, but when she whirled to inspect them it was only Mrs. Trevers, who definitely did _not_ share the Goblin King's way of speaking, and instead sounds like she comes from Georgia.

It happened on the way to Aunt Emily's house; Sarah had been gazing despondently out the car window when she happened to notice the driver in the car beside theirs—blonde hair up at odd angles, the same sharp cheekbones. Sarah slid down behind the door, feet almost up on the dash.

And _now_, of all times or places. The grief counselor's office is supposed to be a therapeutic, calming place where people could get together and talk out their problems. Her father had assured her that he and his wife would be attending too, most days when they didn't have something else to do. Today was one of those days, so by the time Sarah spots him it's too late to beg Karen to come back and pick her up. He's sitting in the circle already, hands clasped and head bowed, the perfect picture of grief in his black shirt and casual jeans.

Somehow he manages to make even the innocuous outfit seem sinister, and Sarah stops just short of shuddering; it only reinforces her dislike of the color black.

"Sarah, come sit." The counselor smiles gently at her and offers a seat beside the newcomer. Sarah declines and picks a chair on the opposite side of the circle. Jareth doesn't look up, and she chooses to ignore him too.

Eventually, the rest of the circle members wander in and the counselor begins the session, starting off with introducing the newcomer—Gareth Beaumains—and the rest of the members introduce themselves. When it is Sarah's turn, she barely mumbles her name and stares at the floor. People speak; she doesn't bother to pay much attention, submersed in her own thoughts as she is.

_What are you playing at?_ The more peaceful part of her wants to ask him. The rest of her just wants to throttle him, and to hell with his shady motives. It doesn't really matter why he's there, other than he just _is_ and he's probably not going to leave her alone anytime soon.

"Now, Gareth, is when newcomers usually speak of what is troubling them. We understand if you are not ready yet, but—"

"I am ready." He tells her gravely. "I'd like to get this off my chest."

And he flashes the room a watery smile that makes Sarah want to gouge his eyes out. One of the ladies a seat of two down from Sarah sighs dreamily.

_Why can't he just let me be?_ She screams internally, _why can't he just let me go?_

"And who have you lost?" The counselor asks soothingly in the gentle, maternal way she has. It normally doesn't bother Sarah, she actually finds it comforting most of the time, but when it's directed at _him_, Sarah hates it. It's because he's _lying_, and this is supposed to be a place of truth, of sincerity and safety…

He's tearing it all apart for her.

"A brother-in-law." He sighs, sweeping the assembled crowd with mournful eyes. He lingers a little longer on Sarah and she fidgets in her plastic chair, suddenly intensely uncomfortable.

"Tobias. He really was very young, you see—his parents had his older sister at a very young age and he was a bit of a surprise—but losing him has been very rough on the entire family, especially my poor _darling_."

He says the word the same way he said it while masquerading as the doctor and Sarah's heart almost stops. She squeezes her eyes shut and grips the edge of her chair, wishing that she were anywhere but there. _Anywhere_—she'd almost prefer to be back at the hospital in the waiting room.

"He died of a wasting sickness, something that his parents didn't quite manage to catch in time. Not that there was much to be done; it seems to have been something that even modern medicine here could not heal."

This sets her on edge because the way he says it—_modern medicine_ here_...?_ she seethes—makes it seem as if he knew what was wrong and could have fixed it. Other people don't notice and a few nod in sympathy. She narrows her eyes and brings her gaze to his; from across the circle they make eye contact, both offering threats that neither one is willing to back down from.

It is "Gareth" that finally breaks the connection, though. He turns back to the counselor and inclines his head slightly.

"His sister especially blames herself."

Sarah's nails scrape against the textured plastic of the chair when her grip tightens too sharply and sends her fingertips sliding across the surface. A few people turn to look at her but she stares at their mutual counselor, watching the false mourner out of the corner of her eye. He smiles a little, and only for a second. If she hadn't been looking directly for it, she probably would have missed it.

Gareth's turn ends and it is time for somebody else to speak; Sarah keeps her head down, studiously investigating her knees and the faded denim that covers them.

When the circle reaches her, she refuses to speak. It's not worth it if _he's_ there.

The moment that the second hand in the clock on the wall turns the hour, Sarah stands and makes to leave the room. As soon as her hand touches the door to push out, the air around her seems to warp, almost, and when she looks behind her to see if anybody else took notice of it, she is alone.

The room had been full a minute ago, she had been the first to stand, so why…

With twin dawnings of dread and realization, Sarah slowly turns around to face the door again. Instead of the solid, safe wooden barrier, the tip of her nose almost brushes cool black Goblin King armor.

Sarah stumbles back but catches her foot on the leg of one of the discarded chairs and she lands in it with a squeak.

"_Why?_" Is her only plaintive question. He advances and she scrambles back over the chair, leaving it between them as if it could offer her some sort of protection.

"Give me your book, _Sa_rah."

"Take it! You can have it!" She drags another chair in front of her to join the other.

"Give it to me." He orders.

"I don't have it _now_." She tries to explain. "Do you think I carry that thing around with me?" A nervous, half-hysterical laugh bubbles out from between her lips.

"Just go get it, leave me alone!"

"What do you think lies within your future, Sarah?" The chairs are gone, and she's not sure where they've gone but she wishes they were back. He still takes languid step after languid step towards her and she's quickly running out of space to escape to.

"I don't know!"

"Think."

"I—I… I'll go to college, get a job—something—I don't _know!_" She sidesteps quickly away from the wall directly to her back, but too late she realizes that in another fifteen feet when the new wall comes to end, she has herself trapped in a corner.

"Think again, precious."

"I don't know!" She tells him again. "I don't _know_!"

He takes five or six quick steps and she has to counter with her own, tripping over a metal chair leg—

He _smiles_.

—and into the wall.

"What do you _want?_" Sarah whisper-wails, voice breaking to a sob at the last word. Though he's easily two feet away from actually touching her, he has her pressed up against the wall, unable to move either forward or to the side. He seems to consider her question, holding his head at an angle.

"What do _I _want, Sarah?"

He leans forward, and Sarah is _sure_, in that moment, that her eyes have never been as wide as they are now. The corners even hurt.

"What I want…" He says, more to himself than to her, staring at her jaw and finally tracing it with one finger.

"What I want…" He repeats. In a lightning-fast moves that surprises Sarah, he grabs her chin and yanks her face forwards, painfully, so that they are mere centimeters away from touching. She breathes out sharply and he releases her.

Sarah slams into the wall, focusing on not having a heart attack, image complete with her gasping and pressing a hand on her chest as if that would prevent anything.

She still watches him warily, but he steps back, nods once, and disappears.

Like a frightened colt, she bolts for the door before he can change his mind.

Her parents are waiting in the car, parked in front of the building when she sprints out of the glass doors, letting them slam behind her.

"Bathroom." She mutters by way of an explanation, diving into the back seat and slamming the car's door behind her too.

"For fifteen minutes?" Karen asks, incredulous.

"We got out late." Sarah snaps venomously. "It's not my _fault_."

"Of course not." Her father replies placidly.

* * *

><p>"Sarah, are you okay?"<p>

It's her father, again, but as always, he only bothers to knock and talk, never enters her room.

Which might actually suit her, right now.

Sarah lies on her back, staring at her ceiling with her hands folded over her stomach.

"I'm fine."

"Dinner is ready, if you're hungry."

"I'm not."

"… Okay then."

She listens to his footsteps retreat from her door, down the hallway and then down the stairs, and as soon as she can hear him in the kitchen, she swings her legs over the edge of her bed.

In one swift movement, she crosses her room, yanks her window open, and hurls the little red book out. It lands on the dry grass below with a soft thud. Sarah slowly closes her window and makes sure to lock it. At some point in the past few days, somebody moved her blinds back up—she makes sure that they're down again.

_There. If he wants the book, he can just damn have it._

Sarah retreats back to her bed and flops out on it again, burying her head in her pillow this time.

Within seconds of her finding a comfortable position, there's that scratching at her window that tells her the owl is there. She half wonders if he took the book or not but then decides that she doesn't care—if that's what he wanted (he demanded it, at any rate) then he'd take it. If it wasn't…

She'd find a way to cope.

Perhaps a trip to the library would yield results. Maybe she'd figure out what he is, what banishes him… That idea actually sounds _good_, and she sits up with and a sudden fervor, springs out of bed.

"Karen dad, I'm taking the car to the library, bye!"

And she's out the door before they can respond, or even really register what she's said.

The library has a plethora of information, of course, but three books in, she's not sure if anything is relevant to her needs. Goblins, according to the mythology that she has read so far, are never mentioned as having a king. That doesn't rule it out, she knows, but…

Surely there would be _some_ mention of a king so different from his people in the way he is _somewhere_, but there doesn't seem to be. He doesn't look anything like the goblins; he reminds her just a _little_ of Tolkien's elves, but…

Oh.

_Oh_.

Sarah flips to the index in the book, finds _Elves, Sprites and Pixies_ and skims the incredibly long section. Something called an _Erlk__ö__nig_ stole children, though there seemed to be some debate over what to call him—_Elfenkönig_ or _Erlk__ö__nig—_but when she pursues the "stealing children" route, she is sorely disappointed.

All sorts of creatures from all over the world stole babies—when they were replaced, the replacement was called a changeling.

But that doesn't help Sarah, and she grows increasingly frustrated, flipping the pages at a furious rate to find something, anything that would help her.

And then she sees the word _iron_, and she's pretty sure she's found it.

Cold iron in particular, though cold iron is defined simply as a poetic or archaic term for simple iron. She's pretty sure there has to be _something_ iron around her house, so she breathes a sigh of relief and leans back in her chair.

The next item on the list is also laughably attainable—salt, of all things, was believed to ward off the fey.

And there was something about clothes, though it confuses her more than anything else. Turning an article of clothing inside out was supposed to make you unrecognizable to any fey (or fairy or sprite or what-have you—the different names are starting to confuse Sarah).

And with another turn of the battered book's page, Sarah's lighthearted hope takes a turn for the worse.

_In some folk beliefs_, she reads,_ the fey are equated with dead spirits. Similarities have been noted in the commonalities of the legends told of both ghosts and fey, the _sídhe_ in actuality being burial mounds, it being dangerous to eat or drink_—her stomach turns—_in both Hades and a fey's _rath_ or _sídhe_, and both the dead and the fey living underground._

Sarah stares at the words on the page, mouth open, and tries to assure herself that it's _just_ words she's seeing, written down by somebody who probably doesn't even believe that fey are real. She blinks and rubs her eyes and, ignoring the growls from her stomach, turns back to the changeling section.

_Faeries play pranks, blah, blah, bl _—oh, here it was…

_But far more dangerous behaviors have also been attributed to fairies. Any form of sudden death might stem from a fairy kidnapping, with the apparent corpse being a wooden stand-in with the appearance of the kidnapped person. Consumption was once a disease thought to be caused by faeries forcing a young man or woman to dance at a revel every night, leading them to waste away from lack of rest, food, or drink_.

She leans back again, as if to get away from the book, and almost tips her chair back. Reconsidering her action, she leans forward, reads the passage again and then slams the book shut.

Disgust mars her face.

"Is that considered a _joke?"_

Perhaps it's hitting a little close to home—after all, she _did_ eat there, she _did_ dance hours away—and she rationalizes this.

_There's nothing to be upset about_, she reminds herself. _You came back, didn't you? No harm done. You came back._

She breathes out a heavy sigh and picks up the book, taking it over to the librarian so that she can check it out.

_You came back_. She tells herself again. _Besides, you don't even know if that's what he is, and the book—well, the book could be wrong. They have been before._

But before she goes home, she stops at a corner store and purchases an extra large container of salt. It's the only thing she buys and probably a waste of the five dollars she pays for it, but holding it in her hands makes her feel at least a little more comfortable than she had been preciously.

When she gets back to the house, she surprises the two adults watching television by whistling cheerfully.

"The library had some good books." She tells them, heading off any questions they might ask. "And it's going to be a beautiful night."

It truly might be, because she plans on putting some of the salt on her windowsill.

But the owl is there when she gets back, and she recoils from her window as if struck; she didn't expect to see it there, and its sudden appearance at the drawing of the blinds did not please her.

Slowly, her horrified expression turns to one of lazy triumph.

"I read _all_ about you." She tells the owl through the glass, waving the library book. "Who knew you didn't like salt?" The salt container joins the book.

Sarah drops them both when the owl beats its wings at the window and screams. It actually sounds… _angry_.

She pulls the blinds down again and catapults herself onto her bed, a safe distance away from the window.

Her chest heaves up and down with the effort of her breathing, and Sarah decides that it _is not_ a good idea to taunt the otherworldly being. She probably should have been clued in by the strange expression he managed to wear, even as an owl, but their last encounter had left her grappling for some sort of power, some sort of sway over him.

Well, she got it.

And then promptly dropped it.

A little puddle of salt sits on her floor; she supposes that the salt broke open. The book it okay when she picks it gingerly up because it managed to land on the cover and not the pages.

Tentatively, Sarah scoops some of the spilled salt up and peeks out her blinds—the owl is gone. Smiling a little warily to herself, she pours a steady line of the white substance until she reaches the furrows in the woods.

Smile turned now to a frown, she traces them. They're about the right size for talons to fit into… Damn it.

Maybe there was something in the book about owls or shape shifting too.

**A/N**  
>Incidentally, have any of you actually ever been surprised by a barn owl's screech? It's absolutely terrifying… especially walking in the woods at night. Alone.<p>

And yes, I totally felt like a monster for Toby.

Some history/mythology nerds like me might gut a tiny chuckle out of "Gareth," but in all seriousness I _did_ read somewhere that that might have been the inspiration for Jareth's name.

_0928soubi_: I know. I didn't really like writing it. _  
>Broken Memories<em>: There are so many questions that I want to answer, but I can't! I have a bad habit of spoiling my own stories to people.


	4. Harvest

By August, Sarah is pretty sure something is wrong with her eyes. And her ears.

And potentially her mouth, but she's not too sure if she's just exaggerating that to herself or not.

The problem with her eyes is not the typical one; generally as one ages, eyesight declines, and Sarah has been using contacts for the past two years but now she finds herself putting them in with less and less frequency. When she wears them they give her headaches and make her feel a little nauseous.

Karen catches her throwing them out one day and insists that she see the optometrist. Sarah tries to explain—"I can see just fine without them, I don't need them,"—and Karen counters with a succinct "you're not an eye doctor, Sarah," and that is the end of _that_ argument. Not that Sarah doesn't at least try to worm out of the appointment, of course. Her attempts are simply futile.

"And how long have your contacts been giving you headaches?" Mr. Paluch asks, staring into her eyes with the little blinding light in his hand, much too close for comfort.

"I don't know…" _Since the labyrinth_, "Maybe like… two months? I've stopped wearing them."

He _hems_ and _hums_ and stares into her eyes for what seems to be an impossibly long time before handing her something and instructing her to hold it over her left eye.

"Now read the smallest line you can."

"P," she reads off, "F, C, D, T, Z, L, E."

Mr. Paluch blinks at her and instructs to do it again, this time covering her right eye. Sarah reads the line again, a little more irritated.

"Miss Williams, I do believe that your vision has improved." He sounds absolutely astounded, and Sarah can't quite quell her flicker of aggravation. "In fact, I think it's _perfect_."

"Yes, I know. That's what I've been saying." She attempts tried patience and manages to sound only tried. She's not prepared for the barrage of questions that he throws her way—have you been doing anything differently, have you had any injuries, have you, have you, have you…

It seems almost never-ending, and by the end of it, Sarah is almost bored to tears. Every now and then she shoots Karen with little _I told you so_ glances that her stepmother scowls lightly at. By the time that they leave the office, though, Karen seems to have forgotten them and instead is running on and on and on about how much money they'll save now that they have one less person with vision problems. It's a little annoying, but it's better to listen to her drone than it is to think about why she suddenly has perfect vision. It's not that she doesn't appreciate it, but…

The next thing she notices is her hearing.

Little things that she shouldn't have been able to hear she now suddenly can—a pen scratching on paper from half a room away, her father searching through drawers for his second favorite (though seldom used) watch, and the unfolding of a cloth napkin at a restaurant.

The most unsettling thing she hears is Karen crying softly upstairs.

She wonders if she's simply imagining all of the noises, but when Karen comes downstairs with visibly red eyes, her unasked question is answered.

At the same time she notices her sense of hearing is heightened, she stops really seeing the Goblin King. He never appears at therapy again, doesn't haunt her through strangers. It should comfort her, but it doesn't, not really. She wants to know where he is. _Keep your enemies closer_, and all that.

But she doesn't mind that she can now have her blinds open without fearing that there will be an owl looming on the other side of the glass. That's nice.

She keeps the line of salt straight and orderly, replenishing it when she needs to, which is actually quite often. The wind rips at her corner of her house and so every morning she stares mournfully out her window and flicks the top of the salt canister open. It's routine.

She wishes that it wasn't.

But her refusals of meals are routine too, and her parents wish that they were not.

"Sarah, dinner is spaghetti tonight. Are you hungry?"

"Not really." She answers placidly. "Not right now."

"Your father picked curry up at the market…"

"I don't really like curry that much. I'll make myself something else later."

"We got fresh peaches, see. They're about to go out of season…"

And this time, they both notice the distinct green tinge her face takes.

"No. No, I don't like peaches."

It's whispered, hard for them to hear but they both somehow catch it.

"Sarah, look! They have pad thai here—you liked that the last time you had it, didn't you?"

"Yeah." She answers, skimming the menu. She orders it but mostly just pushes it around her plate. Her father notices and draws his wife's attention. She nods slightly, saying _I know, I know_, without words and then asks Sarah if she wants to box it up to take home and finish later, maybe for lunch tomorrow.

Sarah declines.

It's a rough slap in the face for the two adults, who before them see their infant again, embodied in the teenage girl. All of the refused bottles and cereal, coughing what little food he managed to take in, screaming a few minutes later in hunger. Try again. Refuse. Repeat.

And again with Sarah.

Dark circles grace the bottoms of her eyes and she seems to be always peering out from shadows. She sleeps fitfully.

Sarah sees this but is too tired or too preoccupied to care or cover it up. Food still tastes like ashes and dirt in her mouth, but it's not a lie when she says that she isn't hungry; she isn't, not for what's being offered. Her problem regarding hunger is that she _is_, she's _ravenous_, but only in spurts and always for something she can't quite name. Sometimes she gets the taste of peaches in her mouth, and she'll eat whatever her father or Karen is trying to ply her with just to get the essence of the fruit out.

School starts in late August and her friends aren't quite sure what to think about her frail appearance, how to take in her fatigue or dark circles or nonexistent appetite, so they chalk it up to a dead brother and ignore it. There's nothing they can do anyway, they tell themselves. You can't bring back the dead.

It would have been a comforting thought for Sarah, too, but she has the sneaking suspicion that something isn't quite right about that statement. Whatever Jareth was—is, just because he's out of _her_ life doesn't mean he's _gone_—he didn't seem to think that the laws and conventions of the _real world_ mattered much to him. That was her impression, anyway. He waltzed about his kingdom, from what she could gather, with an air of irresponsibility and a blatant disregard for the basic laws of physics as she knew them, and worse; he brought that over to _her _world.

The brief brush she had with him, trapped and alone in the therapist's room told her that, and his visitations as an owl only strengthened that notion.

So yes, Sarah _could_ ask him to bring her brother back, potentially. There were just two problems.

The first is that even if she did ask, there was no guarantee that anything would be done—indeed there was no guarantee that he even _could_ do anything.

The second problem is that Sarah is absolutely, irrevocably and completely out-of-her-wits terrified of the Goblin King.

She's not a coward by any stretch of the imagination, of course. She ran the labyrinth, didn't she? She braved the loss of a mother who had, by her at-the-time seven-year-old reasoning, abandoned her to a father and unfamiliar new stepmother. She braved a new life with a baby brother, and she braved the loss of her younger half-sibling. Dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, indeed.

So she's not a coward.

But she's afraid of the otherworldly king who could so easily be compared to the bogeyman that she hardly bothers to make the distinction.

She hides her terror and keeps her head down. What remains of her family is healing, however slowly it might be. They can get over this.

August fades to September and the leaves very slowly begin to change with the faint passing of the season. Her first spotting of a bright red leaf leaves Sarah with the slightest feeling of dread.

Bright and early on the morning of September third, news of a missing baby is broadcasted all over the tri-state area. There's no clues; no fingerprints, no ransom, the parents had no enemies, and only the pleas of the parents for their baby to be brought home safely can be heard.

Two days after that, a toddler goes missing from a park, right out from under her father's nose. Again, there are no leads in the investigation. The park was fortunate enough to have a shop next to it that had security cameras recording where the parent and child were. The little girl is shown crawling behind a tree.

She isn't shown coming back out.

By the third assumed kidnapping precisely two days later, the entire nation is in an uproar.

News anchors never stop broadcasting the tearful pleas of the parents affected, and Sarah, too, is taken into the simmering anger of the time.

But by mid September, Sarah begins to realize that something else is happening.

The seventh child has been snatched, and yet the pattern of missing children has been growing closer and closer to her, geographically speaking. There are still no clues and she's not sure why, but her mind turns to goblins.

The days tick by slow and sticky with foreboding for her. The atmosphere feels oppressive.

And then comes the phone call from Aunt Emily.

"_Sarah!_" The woman screams, "Sarah, please, please get Karen on the phone!"

"I… Yeah, okay!"

"It's Jillian!" They say at the same time.

Silent with shock and turmoil, Sarah hands the phone to Karen. Some of her thought must have shown on her face though; Karen tears the receiver from Sarah grip.

There's a few shell-shocked moments on Karen's part and then very levelly she asks, "Have you called the police yet?"

Karen is silent for a few more minutes before hanging up.

"Robert and I are going to go over to Emily's, okay Sarah? Stay here and watch the house."

Sarah nods, dumbstruck.

"How long will you be gone?"

Karen pauses halfway up the stairs.

"I really don't know, Sarah, but I'm going to pack clothes for a while. We'll call every day to check in."

Sarah nods and flees to her own room. It's at least half of an hour before she is called back downstairs by her father, their bags in hand.

"We'll call." He says, giving her a one-armed hug. Karen pecks her on her forehead and then they're gone.

The house is eerily quiet, even with her odd hearing. The daily background noise of people just living is gone and about an hour into her solitude, Sarah realizes that she's alone. _Completely_ alone. It doesn't sit well with her.

She totters into the kitchen, finds the calendar, and marks off the day, September twenty-second. She doesn't really notice the little italicized words under the date, _Autumnal Equinox_, but as she's considering the calendar as a whole there's a strange… tittering noise behind her, almost as if somebody's… laughing. But the laughter sounds oddly raspy and nasal at the same time. Gently placing the calendar back on its hook, Sarah turns slowly.

There's nothing there. She could have _sworn_ it was right behind her.

Instead of letting herself really think about it, she pops one of her favorite movies into the VCR and passes out in the middle of it.

Waking up for school the next day is a bit of a problem and she's not really paying any attention in any of her classes; she goes through the basic motions and if anybody notices, they don't say a word. Roughly five hours after she gets home she gets a call from her father and he says that nothing has been found; no clues, no motives, just like the other kidnappings. Sarah makes noises of concern and pity that are genuine, but she knows. Nothing is going to be found because there is nothing _to _find. Why would there be, if an ethereal king was behind it all?

It was just like that with Toby—besides the empty crib, nothing else was out of place.

_Though there was that little kick_, she reminds herself, _that little movement under the blanket that looked so wrong, did not look like Toby_.

Yeah, Toby. The baby she won back.

She assures her father that she's fine, that nothing has happened since they left and that she'll eat something for dinner. It's not a definite promise, but she'll try, if she can find something that doesn't taste like dust.

They hang up mutually and as soon as the phone is back on the rocker, Sarah hears the sound of twisted metal and crunching glass outside her front door. She stands stock-still for a split second before she shoots out of the kitchen in a flash and finds herself at the scene of a car accident.

"A-are you okay?" Sarah asks, testing the door gingerly. It opens, but swings only a few inches out. The driver mumbles something and her head lolls to the side.

"I'm going to go and call an ambulance, okay?"

But she doesn't wait for the semi-coherent response she's likely to get, she simply trips her way inside and fumbles with the phone until she manages to dial 9-1-1. She relates the incident to the operator and then scrambles back outside.

The unfortunate driver of the vehicle doesn't seem too injured; she has a few scratches on her face from her fractured windshield, and though her car is wrapped pretty decently around the ancient tree beside the road, she's able to move around within the confines of the car. Other people have come out to stand around the car—others are calling emergency services too.

"There was a… baby." She slurs when Sarah crouches next to her.

"A baby?"

"Wearing red. An' white." She opens her eyes wider and pulls her gaze out from the middle distance, dragging her arm up to point somewhere a good ten yards away. The streetlamp is out there, so the area is bathed in shadow.

"There he is. Was in fron' of me."

Sarah strains her eyesight trying to find what she's pointing to, but she shadow seems darker, somehow, than it should.

"I don't see…" But there, isn't there something… glimmering just at the edge of the light that the headlights throw off? It's not a baby, it's more of a dull coppery color and it's only two circles. But whatever it is steps closer and Sarah can make out that they're _eyes_, oddly dull and almost perfectly circular, unblinking. They blink once, twice, and then disappear completely.

"I don't see a baby." She says, swallowing hard.

"Mmm." The woman sighs, but is drowned out by the wail of a siren and the flashing of almost too-bright red and blue lights. Sarah stands and backs away, into the circle that her neighbors have formed and then slips away back into her house.

The next morning, there's a little bit of glass on the ground where the car had been, but even though she looks, there's no clue as to what to owner of the copper eyes was.

In the afternoon when she returns from school, there's a crew working on taking down the tree. Though the woman hadn't been too badly injured, her car and the tree certainly were, and the tree is already showing signs of dying. That, coupled with the risk involved of it falling over on a house, means that it has to be torn down.

Sarah's sad to see it go; it was a nice climbing tree and good for shade in the summer, but she's more curious about the thing she'd seen behind it the night previous.

The books she loaned from the library don't really seem to help, and her research is hindered by the fact that she never got a really good look at the thing, whatever it was. The section on goblins is no help whatsoever because she _knows_ what goblins are like, and they're nothing like the hulking beasts proffered in the book.

It might have been helpful for the salt and iron, but it seems as if it stops there. And besides, that's more of a general catch-all, not specific. Like goblins.

She slams the book shut in her desperate ire, and only then notices the little feather stuck between the cover and the first page. It's a tiny one, like a down feather and she picks it up, staring at it. When she finally realizes that it's the right color, she shakes it off her hand.

"No." She tells it sternly, grabbing a tissue from off of her dresser and picking it up again, angling her window open slightly with her free hand.

"Keep your feathers and your goblins to _yourself_."

The only reason she says it is because she's pretty sure he is nowhere near her at the moment. After the feather floats down to the ground below, she shuts her window and locks it for good measure. She's already dressed and prepared for bed, and as soon as she makes herself comfortable underneath her covers, she remembers something about the date Jillian was snatched.

She runs downstairs to check it, and sure enough it's what she thought it was.

"You give her back." She hisses into her dark room. "You give her back _right now_."

**A/N**  
><em>sarah:<em> No, thank _you!_  
><em>0928soubi:<em> It is. You'd think a king would have better manners, but there it is.


	5. Samhain

Life moves on. The air grows colder as September melts into October and unlike years passed, Sarah does not bother to look for a Halloween costume.

The shops all boast their own collection of masks and Sarah does her best to ignore them—sure, there were the still-popular Kreuger masks for sale, with the plain white Jason Voorhees masks in a close second for popularity—those aren't the ones that bother her.

The goblin ones do, and out of the corner of her eye one day she sees one that reminds her of the strange and completely unhelpful old man that she and Hoggle passed by… after she'd relinquished her ring, of course. That is simply insult to the injury, and she rubs the skin where the ring would have been, had she been able to keep it.

What perhaps bothers her more are the vaguely masquerade-like masks for sale, usually tucked away in a corner of the store's display, if they have one. They remind her too terribly of the masks that the revelers in the crystal bubble wore and that is _not_ an experience that she is likely to look back on fondly within her lifetime.

Terror takes second place to her anger, the raw emotion that buzzes constantly somewhere in the bottom of her heart. If she had seen so much as _one_ real goblin, she's fairly sure she would have had an aneurysm.

And if she had seen the Goblin _King_ she's pretty sure she'd have tried to kill him.

But no, exactly a month passes with no news of _anything_, because even the kidnappings have stopped. The press still runs the stories, of course, and the police are probably still searching, but Sarah still knows that nothing will ever, ever be found.

And she's probably the only person that has an idea as to what happened, but she also knows that if she were to approach anybody with this idea, she'd be locked up for sure. Her future would hold nothing but padded cells and straightjackets.

_What do you think lies within your future, Sarah?_

She's still not sure how to answer the question, but she's angry with herself for letting his words float through her mind again. Sarah can remember them perfectly—every word, every syllable, is preserved perfectly in her mind. And she hates it.

He just can't leave her alone, can he? Even when he's not there, her mind conjures his mocking voice much too perfectly for her to feel comfortable with.

And she can still envision him a little too precisely for her tastes—sure, she couldn't remember things she _needed_ to, like the capital of Slovakia for that test she had two days ago, but she can remember the stupid amulet he wore in perfect detail. Not that there was much of it on the plain ornament, but it still looms large in her mind's eye. She'd almost be worried if she wasn't confident in her utter loathing of the man.

The Halloween shopping frenzy leaves Sarah in a bad mood—while other kids in her school are talking about parties or going trick-or-treating with their younger siblings, or just simply staying home and handing out candy, Sarah has no definite plans. Karen bought plenty of candy but every time Sarah looks at it she gets a giant lump in her throat because _she_ was going to be the one taking him out this year while her parents stayed home. She hasn't been invited to a party yet, but even if she was, she isn't sure she wants to go.

Crowds of people aren't really her favorite anymore, not after that last doomed therapy session… But now that she thinks about it, being alone isn't so swell either. As her windowsill has become an unviable solution for whatever voyeurism he got up to, the Goblin King has taken up residence in the tree just _outside_ of her window. There wasn't really anything Sarah could do to drive him away from there, much to her dismay, so she simply resumed drawing her blinds tight and keeping her light off when possible.

Sarah steps off of the bus (her parents have been unwilling to help her purchase a car until she goes off to college) and dumps her school bag inside, retreating from her house almost as soon as she enters it to check the mail.

Bill, bill, a wedding invitation for Karen, a reminder form the dentist for her father, another bill, and a party invitation for Sarah from one of her friends, a girl named Lisa. She shoulders the screen door open and doesn't see the streak of motion from over the mail.

Dropping the mail on the kitchen table, Sarah swings her bag back into her arms and climbs the stairs to her room with it, intending to do the night's homework. She gets as far as her fifteenth math problem before she can hear the garage door opening—Karen must be home early, she muses—before she remembers the party invitation sitting idly on the table. In a flash, she is out from behind her dresser, abandoning her homework to make an attempt at pilfering the highly conspicuous orange and black glittery monstrosity of a party invitation before her stepmother can see it.

"_Hell_—o, Karen." Sarah says, coming to a skidding stop right before the woman. In her hands is the invitation.

"Sarah, did you plan on going to this?"

"I…"

"Oh, I think you should. You should go to more parties, you know. Just to get out of the house."

"I… I guess I could go for a little." She tells her stepmother, trying to keep the scowl from her face.

"Well then, good. It's a costume party so we need to go out and get you something. Do you have any ideas of what you would like to be?"

"No." Sarah answers sullenly, and Karen purses her lips in exasperation.

"Then we're just going to have to go out and look. Come on, Sarah." And she swings her purse back onto her shoulder and

Sarah sighs and follows Karen back out into the garage into the new white Dodge Caravan that her father is so proud of having purchased, slipping into the passenger's seat and fastening her seatbelt while Karen taps her foot impatiently.

Karen drives them to the mall and Sarah reluctantly hops out of the car and makes her way to where she knows the costumes would be.

_Just pick something and get out_, she tells herself, eying the proffered costumes with a mixture of mild distaste and interest. There's a southern belle costume with a fake hoop skirt that she passes over quickly, and somebody must have carelessly thrown a Thriller costume over in the girl's section, which Sarah also ignores. There are the traditional princess costumes (which she doesn't bother so much as looking at), a few hippie outfits, and—

"Sarah, what about this?"

Karen holds up what _has_ to be a dangerously short mock flapper costume that is completely drenched in bright red sequins.

"I don't have the hair for it." She tries weakly, but Karen breaks out into a wide grin.

"I know. That's why I found _this_." And still grinning, she holds up a wig styled in the "scandalous" bob style of the flapper era.

"Oh. Well, sure. Yeah."

"Go try it on." She beams.

Sarah nods, takes the costume and finds a changing room. Once inside she relinquishes her comfortable street clothes for the costume and, tugging nervously at the short hemline, she steps out of the dressing room to Karen's applause.

"It just looks fabulous on you, Sarah! Do you want it?"

"Um, yes." Sarah says, trying for Karen's enthusiasm. "But could I get tights or something to go along with it? It just feels a little… short."

"That's only because you wear those jeans all of the time. Really, Sarah, that's not the style at _all_."

Sarah shrugs and goes back to change into her comfortable, unfashionable clothes. She places the costume back into the bag from which it came and rejoins Karen out in the front of the store.

"Hey, how are you?" She asks, noticing where the woman's gaze has fallen.

"I'm fine, Sarah. Let's purchase this and then be on our way." Karen's voice is a little tighter than normal.

Sarah nods and turns her back on the infant costumes while Karen goes to get her costume rang up by the sales clerk.

The ride back home is silent, and Sarah abandons Karen downstairs when her father walks through the door to RSVP to Lisa's party.

From downstairs she can hear her parents talking, but they whisper so she misses parts of their conversation.

"—S it safe?"

"I don't think Sarah would go if it wasn't. She's a good girl."

"Hmm. I just don't want to—" Karen drops her voice, but raises it just in time for Sarah to catch "—know how these parties get sometimes."

"She's a good girl." Her father insists.

Not wanting to hear the rest of their conversation, Sarah shuts her bedroom door as silently as possible and sits back down to her formerly abandoned math homework.

* * *

><p>The week before the party passes more quickly than it has any right to, and Sarah is still not exactly looking forward to Lisa's party. She tells herself it will be fun. She tells herself that she'll get to see her friends there, which isn't precisely true because about half of those invited ducked out for various reasons. She tells herself that she's not becoming a recluse.<p>

And then Friday comes, and Sarah manages to muster some actual excitement for the party while she dresses for it. Karen is right—the costume doesn't look bad on her, but it _is_ weird to see herself with short hair. She drives herself to the party, her father in the passenger seat because the vehicle is needed back at home, and promises to call when she wants to come home.

"Have a good time, Sarah." Her father smiles at her before driving off. She raises her hand in goodbye, left behind in the car's fumes. She doesn't stand outside for long, though; Josette, dressed as a gypsy and her boyfriend, Dan, currently a pirate, meet up with her, having only recently vacated their own mode of transportation.

"Hello." They manage to greet each other at the same time, and Sarah breaks out into a real grin. Perhaps this wasn't such a bad idea; she'll have to thank Karen when she gets back home.

"Hullo, guys!" Lisa beams at them, opening the door. The trio is immediately blasted with the sound of people and music. "Look, I'll be right back bu' I've got to make sure Jake's not trying to chat up Martha again, she wants me to keep him away from her—oh, by the way, there are drinks in the tub in the kitchen, you can't miss it. And, uh…" She looks around, presumably for Martha and then titters loudly.

"Uh, if anybody comes with more, just show them where it is, okay? Don't worry, my parents are away."

Sarah is stunned, and a quick glance at her companions shows that Josette at least had an inkling of what sort of party it would be—she only looks mildly irritated at Lisa's behavior while Dan acts as if nothing out of the ordinary has even happened.

They trickle back into the house and Sarah tries desperately to catch Lisa before she disappears.

"Lisa, wait, Lisa!"

But somebody's shoulder cuts her off, and Sarah finds herself staring at a wild mass of long blonde hair.

"Oh." She gasps, taking a few quick steps back. "Oh, I… I'll just… sorry!"

"It's cool. Hey, you a flapper? That's cool too. 'M Axl Rose, the rest of us are 'round here somewhere."

For a minute, Sarah is confused as to what the slightly swaying boy in front of her means.

"Oh, you're…" She laughs, a little relieved. "Guns N' Roses, right?"

"Yeah." He grins. "So are you here wi—"

"Good job there, then." And then she slips away into the steadily growing crowd before he can finish his sentence.

Through a brief gap, Sarah spots the kitty ears that the hostess had been wearing when she answered the door, and she dives for them.

"Hey, Lisa."

"Hey there Sar." She says, using the nickname that Sarah hates.

"Listen, I didn't know it was going to be this kind of party. I'm sorry, but can somebody take me home, please?"

"No can do, little girl. I've been taking keys, don't worry. Nice costume though."

"But Lisa—"

"Oh, stop being such a stick in the mud, Sarah!" Her friend cries exasperatedly. "Just go… party. A drink might help you, they're in the kitchen, remember?"

"Yeah." She sighs, defeated.

"Good. Now I've got to find Martha again." And with a quick pat on Sarah's wigged head, Lisa once again slips into the crowd.

But Sarah doesn't make her way to the kitchen, because something in the crowd has caught her attention.

The shapes—whatever it is—can't be children because they're too short for that and she doesn't think that even Lisa would allow kids at this party, but they can't be animals either, because Lisa doesn't have pets.

And besides, they don't even _look_ like cats or dogs.

"_Heeeey_, it's Sarah!" Somebody from right behind her yells into her ear. She winces from the noise and turns slowly.

"Oh. Hi, Jackie. Did you just get here?"

"Yep." The fake fairy answers her with an enthusiastic nod of her head.

"Do you still have your key?" Sarah lunges at the opportunity. "I didn't know that the party was going to be like this and I would like to get back before it gets worse…"

"Nope, sorry. But don't worry, I'm not really going to be taking in any part of this either and I figured I'd just stay away from the people that get too badly off."

"Yes, okay—oh, did you see that?" She asks, craning her neck. Was that a _goblin?_

"See what?" Jackie asks, twirling around. "Are you sure _you_ haven't been drinking?"

"I'm sure. I… I guess that I just saw a toy or something. It looked kind of like something for Halloween, anyway."

"I guess." Her friend replies, shrugging. "Anyway, I'm going to see what all is up here, okay? Find me later if you want, but somebody's making _eyes_ at you." And before she turned to leave, Jackie pointed to the same band member she had ditched earlier. Just behind him perched on a shelf, a goblin made grotesque faces behind the boy's back.

"What's the matter? You look like you've seen a ghost." As he steps closer to her, the goblin seems to grow even more incensed and the rate at which it changes faces increases.

"No, I just don't think I'm feeling well."

"Maybe you should go home." He says, but seems crestfallen.

"Maybe. I'm going to look for some soda or something."

"I'll come with you."

Sarah shrugs. "If you want."

The kitchen looks like a warzone. And there are more goblins.

One sits in the tub of drinks and ice, pretending to nip at people's fingertips when they reach for a drink. Another lays flat out on his back on top of the refrigerator. A third crouches on top of the tall cabinets in one corner, following Sarah's movements with large brown eyes. She does her best to ignore them.

Sarah fishes out a ginger ale that is luckily far away from both the alcoholic beverages and the goblin and wonders if she's gone completely insane; surely other people would notice them?

"You know, Axl," she says, addressing the boy by the only name she knows to call him by. "I think I'm going to head home. I really don't feel well."

"Are you okay for it?"

"I haven't been drinking, and I can walk. And before you offer, no, I don't need you to come with me." Her voice is soft and she allows herself to smile a little. "But thanks anyway."

She says her goodbyes, tells Lisa that she's leaving and finally steps out of the house.

It's colder outside than she remembers, but her costume probably doesn't help, and neither does the fact that her hair, up in a bun because of the wig, is not shielding her neck from the wind.

A goblin scampers at her feet, visible only occasionally in the moonlight or soft glow of the sparse streetlamps.

"Just go away." She groans at it, aiming a halfhearted kick somewhere above its head. The goblin only stops his movement long enough to stick his tongue out at her (Sarah is only a little surprised to see that it's an odd purple color) and mutter something that does not sound flattering.

"Shut up." Sarah tells it stiffly.

It mutters some more, sitting on its haunches and glaring at her with its strangely orb like amber eyes. In this precise moment, Sarah chooses to run. Thankfully, her shoes only have the slightest heels to them and they stay on her feet as she does her best to sprint down the busy street, aiming for each streetlamp in the dark.

Her run isn't very desperate; she mostly just longs to be away from the goblin and the party, to curl up safe and warm in her own house, her own bead, far away from any pestering owls or their horrific tendency to kidnap human children. Sort of like out of some sort of demented fairytale, really.

_But there's no hero_, she tells herself, _because the hero is too petrified to get her butt in gear._

And that is when she finds herself out of breath at the little, mostly abandoned park by the edge of the road. A swing creaks in the wind and the trees sway in the background; the whole scene is deliciously Halloween-themed.

"Now all that's missing is the d—"

"I trust your evening has been enjoyable, Sarah?"

She doesn't choose to turn around, finding to trees and the moon to be a preferable view to the menacing Goblin King somewhere behind her.

"No." She hisses. "And you know it. Your goblins running about all over the place—how could anybody have a nice night?"

"My goblins have free reign this night, more than they will have perhaps any other night without my consent. It _is_ Samhain after all, precious."

Sarah stares resolutely at the forest in front of her, crossing her arms against the cold.

"But I suppose you would not know what that means, would you?"

"It's Halloween. I'm not _stupid_. Go away."

The chilled girl can practically _feel_ his grin in the moonlight.

"Is this a new look for you, _Sa_rah?" The wig is tugged from her head, to the protest of the bobby pins that he almost gently tugs out of her bun.

"You're not going away, are you?" Her words sound hollow, even to her own ears.

"Not as of yet."

Sarah hugs her arms tighter and takes a step forward, away from his grasp.

"I was at a party. Not that you need to know."

"Ah, yes. I believe you were. It was one of those paltry, juvenile human fetes, wasn't it? Do you honestly believe you belong there, with them? Your future could hold so much more."

She snorts in disbelief and anger and briefly considers turning to face him. And maybe slap him.

"No, I suppose you think I fit in better with the decadent masquerade crowd—of course I fit in with the '_paltry, juvenile, human fetes_'—I happen to _be_ human. Just like those kids you stole. Give them _back_."

Before she can react, the crushing strength of his leather clad hand is on her shoulder, forcibly turning her to face him.

"I would watch your words, girl. You do not know what your future holds."

"And I suppose you do?"

"I have reordered time, I have turned the world upside down, and—"

Sarah barks a laugh.

"Don't even _try_ that, Goblin _King_. You don't do anything for anybody but _you_; I'm just trying to figure out what you want with _me, _but I suppose I'm just an amusing distraction. Hoggle was right, you really are a rat." And saying it, she sounds a lot braver than she really feels.

"You have no idea what I have done." He takes in a deep breath and straightens up, loosening his bruising hold on her shoulder. Sarah lets out her own breath and, taking advantage of his brief inattentiveness, darts away from him again, making a path towards the forest.

"I was not aware that we were done conversing, Sarah."

She hates how he doesn't sound out of breath although he's sprinting just behind her while hers is ragged.

"Well, _I_ am!" She gasps for air, narrowly managing to doge a tree in the dark.

"Whereas I am not. Sarah, what would you do for your Jillian?"

The casual manner in which he asks the question startles her into stopping, and once again he traps her bare shoulders in his grip.

"Anything." She breathes, searching his eyes for a hint to what he's thinking about. There's nothing there, of course, and the proximity of his face to hers is certainly worrying.

They stand like that for a frozen few minutes—the king crouched over the girl, the girl staring up at the king—until he takes a step back, straightens himself out again, and grins as if she has suddenly decided to reveal all of the world's secrets to him.

"Until the Solstice." He says with a mock bow.

Sarah can still see his feral grin.

**A/N**  
>This is late because I faced a rather sudden death in my family and managed to fracture both my wrist and my elbow (again).<p>

Anyway, here's to hoping I still have a bit of a readership! Things start to really ~happen~ from here on out.


	6. Solstice

There's a minor spot of trouble when Sarah shows up on her own doorstep shivering with cold that ran to her bones and her wig askew, feet and lower legs covered with mud and the skeletons of leaves. She mumbles something about a party game being outdoors, shoulders past the disapproving adults and sits in the shower for an hour with the water so hot her skin turns red and when she finally steps out, she steams lightly.

Little fingertip bruises grace her shoulders.

"Sarah?"

She sits up from her bed and creeps over to her locked door.

"Yes?"

"Could you please let me in?"

Sarah unlocks the door but does not open it; Karen does herself but does not walk too far into her room. Instead she stands just barely in the doorway with her nightdress and curlers and takes Sarah's hollowed eyes and thin lips in.

"We just wanted you to know that we're very proud that you left that party."

"Okay."

"It wasn't a good place to be; but why didn't you call and ask one of us to pick you up?"

Sarah shrugs and lands heavily on her bed, picking up the corner of a blanket and playing with the already worn edge.

"I don't know. I wanted to walk a bit and I didn't want to bother you."

Karen purses her own lips and shakes her head, curlers following the movement in an almost absurd manner.

"It wouldn't have been a bother. Just remember that if there's a next time."

"Okay."

And then Karen is gone, _flip-flip-flipping_ her way down the hall in her slippers to her own room. Sarah rubs her shoulder where the bruises are and presses down on one experimentally—it doesn't hurt, but she's not sure if it's because they were only minor ones or if the hot water had done something for them.

A week later most of them are gone. Three days after that, there's nothing to prove that she even had them.

Half a month later and she has almost been able to convince herself to forget that she ever had them and where they came from.

That is, until she remembers his words in chilling detail and realizes that the solstice is looming ever nearer.

_Until the Solstice_. And in her mind's eye she can still see him dip down low so that she can see the back of his wild mane of hair and the forest beyond.

His words had an obvious meaning; he intended to visit her again at some point during the Solstice, but that was all that he promised. The hold he had over her through Jillian and the other missing children, he hadn't made a promise for. Sarah had read that the fey were rumored to love games, and as far as she knew, her experiences had taught her that was true. Perhaps he'd offer her another one of his bets.

At the thought, Sarah squares her shoulders. She's beaten his stupid maze once before. She can do it again.

And she ignores the part of her that screams the stakes are higher, the challenge will be tougher and a little more life-shattering rather than ankle-shattering.

In her ears she hears her pulse and she closes her eyes to the sudden brightness of the snow reflecting the sun in a burning white arc across her window. Winter. Winter _Solstice_. She has ten days to prepare for whatever might happen, which hardly gave her any time; how was she to prepare for something so immutable and ferociously cruel as the Goblin King? Adding to that were her midterms, which she _should_ be studying for.

Ten days melt seamlessly to six, and six slip by into two. Sarah snaps at her family and friends when they ask her what's wrong and she spends a lot of time holed up in libraries searching for something she'll only recognize when she finds.

Because she knows, just _knows_ that there's something missing, and she can't be sure if it's something within her gaps of knowledge or something deeper, something coiled tightly in her heart.

There is nothing to find in any of the dusty old tomes that she uncovers that she doesn't already know, that some newer, slimmer and less moldy version hadn't already condensed.

With one day to go and the start of her school's winter break, Sarah wants to cry when she's alone and tear her hair out when she has to talk to somebody. Though she knows that there's nothing new to find, she can't help but to feel that she's wasting her time and that something is not right at all.

Maybe it's just the way she sees more spots than usual after the sun sears her eyes through the snow or how she can pick out more individual snowflakes without really trying, or how she can hear the crunch of snow like a firecracker going off beside her when she walks on the sidewalk.

Or maybe it's that she's feeling too restless to properly sleep but too tired to try to stay up and get her sleep cycle back on track.

The circles under her eyes deepen and food still tastes like sand.

The night before the Solstice, Sarah gathers her painfully neglected salt and fixes her window the way she has had it, keeping the canister near her bedside for what she calls safety. Something tells her that on that night of all nights, what she had just couldn't quite hold him at bay.

She's afraid to go to sleep, but she's even more afraid to wake up and see that December the twenty-first _has_ indeed come and some merciful asteroid has _not_ come to careen into her house to put her out of her misery.

Sarah holds her breath and walks on eggshells for most of the day before she realizes that's stupid; he won't physically pop back into her life until under the cover of darkness. For one thing, he is an owl and they were creatures of the night. For another, if some glittering git of a king had popped into her stepdaughter's room, no amount of magic would have saved him from the combined forces of Karen's wrath and frying pan. Though she and her current mother-figure don't quite see eye to eye, the thought sort of comforts Sarah; it makes her feel like she hasn't been completely abandoned, even if her father and Karen didn't know what they were up against.

For three hours she watches the sun slip lower and lower and feels the temperature drop with it. The long-fallen snow burns a searing red ochre that fades until the moon paints it a glittering silver-blue. Two hours after she runs out of excuses to stay up the retires to her room where she changes into slightly frayed mustard-colored lounge pants that she kind of hates and a black long sleeved shirt that she doesn't. Feeling the cold on her feet she digs her slippers out from under her bed.

Standing, she catches movement out of the corner of her eye outside of the window. It was… well, something perhaps goblin shaped but she couldn't be sure; it moved too fast.

Sarah steps closer to her window, hands shaking as she places them on the inside windowsill. Surely there had been _something_ there, surely she had just seen…

Her courage almost fails her and she pauses for a second before throwing her window open.

"You had better not be playing tricks." She snarls out into the sharp winter air. A goblin with blue, catlike eyes blinks back at her safely behind the line of salt.

"Just… Stay back there then. Please." She instructs it needlessly, and she slowly closes the window, already feeling winter's chill settling deep into her bones. Sarah shudders delicately and wraps her arms around herself, curling her toes into her fluffy slippers.

"Looking for somebody, Sarah?" And the way her name is spoken, somewhere between a curse and a holy intonation, leaves her with no doubt whatsoever as to who is standing directly behind her.

"How did you get in here?" Tries for airy conversation. Fails. Her hands ball into fists on their own accord.

"I put down salt." She says as if to remind him. "I've got iron in here, I… I've got protection. I… you shouldn't be in here."

"And yet I am. Curious." He mock-muses, leaning back to inspect the stuffed toy animals on her wall.

"Tell me Sarah, why you think this is. You must have some idea."

Sarah turns slowly to gather her thoughts, and as she does so a burst of pain flashes behind her eyes.

"You cheated." Sarah offers vehemently, rubbing her temples with winter-chilled fingerse. The pain is mostly gone—the worst of it truly only lasted a second—but the memory of it keeps her fingers at her head and her eyes only half open.

"So eager to cast me as the villain, Sarah."

For a second she steels herself to glare at him, but then closes her eyes.

"How long have you been having headaches, Sarah?"

"Why does it matter? It's passed now."

"It matters." He tells her, and before Sarah can possibly react he steps closer and grips her hands in his gloved ones, tugging her pressing fingers away from her forehead.

"That will not help." He is stern but gentle, and Sarah is as trapped as a mouse with a rattlesnake.

"What you need," he assures her smoothly, "is this." And from out of the air he pulls another perfect peach.

"I've had enough of your tricks." She snarls and makes a move to bat it out of his hand but something holds her back. Instead, she barely manages to tear her eyes away from the little fruit and continues with a slightly shaking voice, "tell me what you meant when you asked what I'd do for Jillian."

"So very businesslike. I must admit, I am surprised, Sarah." He pauses as if to consider the fruit being manipulated in his steady hands and then looks up at her, smiling. It did not reach his eyes.

"I want to know." She persists.

"As I imagine I would, in your circumstance," he assures her. "But it would be better if you took this, Sarah. Better for both of us."

"Just _tell_ me."

"After you eat this. Just _one_ bite."

Without deliberation, Sarah snatches the peach from his hand, careful not to actually touch him, rubs it on her shirt and then opens her mouth wide to take a bite.

Just before her teeth puncture the fruit's thin skin she has time to notice that the Goblin King looks far too gleeful for this to go well for her. Furious and sure that any second now she'll be whisked away to a crystal ballroom, she shoves the fruit back at him. He waves it into nonexistence and wipes away a smear of juice still clinging to her lip. Her breath catches and although she can't quite muster the strength to move, she averts her eyes and stares at their feet.

Hers look particularly puerile compared to his; pink fluff next to hardened black leather.

"What's your offer, Goblin King?" she asks, and hates the way her suddenly breathy voice makes the situation sound more intimate that it had any right to. Incensed with bother herself and him, she looks straight in his mismatched eyes and insists that he tells her what he meant. It is then, that moment that she finishes her demanding sentence that clarity comes rushing back to her and she wobbles where she stands.

"Feeling better, Sarah?"

"I…" Unable to put into words how she feels, she nods.

"Good."

"At the risk of sounding repetitive, I'd like you to tell me what you meant. Are you offering me a way to get Jillian back?"

"How very perceptive. Yes, Sarah. The other children too, if you so wish."

"I'll do it."

"You have yet to hear y terms." He points out, smiling lightly and inclining his head so that they were a little more on level.

"I don't care, I'll do it. I ran your labyrinth before; I can do it again."

"You must start at the very edge of my kingdom and before Imbolc reach the center of power in the labyrinth. Do you agree to run this challenge?"

"What's Imbolc?" She asks, wary.

"It is the first day of Spring, when my power wanes for the year."

Not being in idiot, Sarah can put two and two together.

"Which means right now…" She gets four.

"On this night, the longest of the year, I am at my strongest." Her color drains and she thinks of the now-useless protection charms hidden though her room. That was why the salt didn't work and the iron didn't make the room too oppressive. Briefly she wonders in his weaknesses could be transferred to her because her hands sting lightly where she had placed them in the salt near her window. Trying to look inconspicuous she wipes her lightly sweating palms on her too-short lounge pants.

"I don't get it. You gave me ten hours to get through your entire labyrinth, but now I've got over a month this time?"

Jareth inclines his head but chooses not to correct her on the finer points of her current misunderstanding.

"I don't trust you," she states simply. "I don't like you, either, but I'm going to run it, like Is aid that I would."

He allows himself a little smile when she looks down at her hands and it disappears when she looks back up, hitting him with a sharp but steady glance. It's something he didn't expect, something to very much like _her_ that he almost, almost gasps. But he doesn't, and instead traps her in one of his own steady gazes. She, after a few drawn out minutes of impasse, is the first to look away. And when she speaks, she manages to catch him a little off-guard again.

"What did you do to Toby?"

The question isn't demanding, it isn't sharp and it isn't tense; Sarah sounds weary beyond what her years should allow her to be.

"And don't try to say you didn't do anything because it was only after we got back that he got…" she struggles for a word and then falls back on "_sick_, you were the one that came out and told us, and you barged your selfish, egotistical way into his funeral." Anger makes her brash but she doesn't regret her words.

"Very well, Sarah." He says, but does not continue. Sarah tries to be patient but she shifts uneasily from foot to foot, belying her false confidence.

"Is he really dead? Or is he a…" grappling for the word she pauses long enough to take in a lung-stretching breath of air. "Changeling?"

The word comes out in a great rush of breath. The Goblin King does not answer her immediately but soon enough he opens his mouth wide enough to flash those pointed teeth and say "It is true that young Jareth is dead in this world."

"Toby." Sarah tells him fiercely. "His name is _Toby_." But the way he said 'this world' is not lost on her; she waits for him to continue. She is not met with disappointment.

"However, it is also true that if you were to unearth young _Toby's_ little coffin and take a peek inside, you would find nothing but a slowly rotting bit of log."

Even though she hears the venom in his voice he consents to use the child's given name, and even though it is a spectacularly morbid thought to entertain, Toby not being in his grave is comforting to her simply because it means that he is not dead.

"I want him back too, with the other kids you stole. You told me you were generous—prove it. When I win, I want you to reorder time so that you never take him." Confident in her demand and victory, her courage does not falter, not even when he grins at her as if she's just served herself up on a silver platter with all the dressings.

"What's done is done." His silken smirk mocks her from less than two feet away and foreseeing her half-formed protests he raises a hand for silence.

"Though should you get to the center, and arrangement could perhaps be arranged, if you still so adamantly demand him back. Just be warned, Sarah, the price will most likely be steep."

"I'm going to win." Stubborn. Determined. He couldn't imagine her being anything less. What worries him slightly is that she seems to have completely ignored his words; there _would_ be a price and he had already decided it, it has already been foretold. He just hasn't decided if her chosen ignorance would work for him or not.

For the past few moments after his words she has been studiously inspecting her feet, but she looks up at him through her damnably long lashes, really _looks_ and for a second he thinks that she _knows_.

"_Sarah."_ He breathes, caressing the two simple syllables of her name with an intimacy that she has never heard from anybody else.

The heat that he decides he has wished into her eyes disappears and she takes a half step back, face stretching into a wounded expression as if he's just called her a dirty name.

"What?" Nervous this time. Perhaps shaken.

"Go to sleep. When you wake I will send a guide and you may begin your quest."

She nods, staring at him as if she isn't sure what to do; scream for her family or simply ignore his presence. Or _maybe_…

"I wish you luck."

And with a crack of power he leaves nothing behind but the glittering magic residue and a very confused girl.

Why on earth would he wish her luck? The thought niggles at the back of her mind as she kicks off her slippers and slips between her sheets but she can't quite fathom his reasoning. Eventually she settles on this; he is fey, not human, and she perhaps cannot hold him to her own ideas of an opponent.

And the way he said her _name_. She can't deny even to herself that it sent an odd sort of thrill through her but at the same time it was such an alien way of hearing it that it _did_ startle her, especially because it was coming from _him_, of all people.

But a little part of her thinks she'd like to hear it again.

She falls asleep willing the thought from her mind.

**A/N**

Thank you everybody for the reviews; I can't remember who I did or did not reply to and I am deeply sorry if I did not reply to you. Just know that every word you all write brings a special joy to me. :)

Sorry that I've gone almost a month without an update, but that might be how my update schedule goes because school is starting up again and I've got a pretty heavy schedule.

Finally, uh, if anybody's interested in seeing how my mind kind of works I've recently unearthed the kind-of original outline for this that _perhaps_ could stand as its own work. It's pretty spoilerific but if you'd like, message me and I can send it to you either as a DocX (if I figure it out) or an e-mail.


	7. Borders

Upon waking, Sarah does not immediately open her eyes. Bright sunlight filters through her window and burns through her eyelids, but she can tell by the way her hair stands on end that somebody—probably a goblin, based on what the king had said last night—is peering in at her through the window. She rolls over and curls deeper into the warmth that her heavy blankets provide. But her heart races because she knows that her 'guide' is waiting and so are the stolen kids, and when _does_ she have to start this labyrinth run again? He had told her last night that she would have until spring, which still struck her as odd but she wasn't going to fight it.

Finally deciding that she would rather get the whole ordeal over and done with than wait around, Sarah slides out from between her sheets, draws her blinds so that the wide-eyed goblin outside can't see her, and then changes into more weather-appropriate clothes. Thinking of her ankle, Sarah grabs the drawstring bag from on her doorknob, raids the household's supplies of bandages and antibiotic cream and after a moment's deliberation, a flashlight, spare batteries, and a lighter change of clothes as well as a few granola bars. Though she doesn't expect the journey to be an arduous one, it can't hurt to have some extra supplies if she gets stuck in another oubliette—especially now that she knew a simple plank of wood could easily function as a way out. As for the clothes, well, she had no way of knowing what the weather was like in the Goblin kingdom and if it somehow managed to be colder than where she was now, they would serve as another layer.

Thinking herself rather clever and prepared, Sarah opens her blinds and waves jauntily to the little goblin outside. She even opens her window up and invites the black furred creature inside. It scampers in through the broken salt line and waits patiently for her to collect her bag in her arms again.

"So you're my guide?"

It blinks at her serenely.

"You're kind of… cute. Were you waiting outside all night?" She tries at politeness—after all, Ludo and Hoggle and Didymus hadn't been all bad, and _they_ had been residents of the Goblin Kingdom. Willing to give the little goblin the benefit of her doubt, Sarah holds out her hand.

"Was it cold?"

The goblin blinks again, and then,

"Of course it was cold; there was snow on the ground."

Sarah sucks in a deep breath, unsure if she's more surprised that it can talk or that its tone is so scathing.

"Oh. I didn't know you could talk."

It stares at her with its lurid eyes and then pokes her bag with a little calloused hand as if testing the strength of the machine-made cloth.

"You're bringing all of this along?"

"Yes."

"Good job, then."

Unsure if it is a true compliment or not, Sarah mumbles a thanks and shifts the bag so that she can slide it on her shoulders. It's not heavy, which is a blessing, but it's sort of bulky, which is not. To her dismay, the goblin jumped onto the top of the bag and made itself at home. She almost stumbled backwards under the unexpected weight.

"Turn left."

Sarah turns left.

"Now walk forward."

"But that's my desk." She tells the little goblin patiently. "I _can't_ walk forward." Indeed, her white, girlish desk and chair sat directly in front of her, though they have long been stripped of their labyrinthian toys—the miniature Goblin King, the Firey stuffed toy, the little music box that reminded her so painfully of the peach dream…

"And on your desk is your mirror. Now walk forward and touch your mirror." It shifts and Sarah can feel her hair being moved, probably so that the goblin can get a better view.

"Fine."

And standing on her tippy-toes and stretching her arm so that she could reach her mirror and not jostle the goblin in the process, she reaches out and touches the cool, flat surface.

Sarah had half expected to feel the crackle of electricity or smell something sweet like peaches when she laid her hand on the mirror, but there was nothing beyond the ordinary mirror feeling.

"There's nothing happening." Not exactly an auspicious start to her journey, she has to admit. "Isn't something supposed to ha—"

And then her hand sinks into her mirror, the usually solid surface rippling like water.

"Yes." The goblin says placidly, and Sarah wants nothing more than to throw the cheeky thing a dirty look.

Finding the slight pulling motion on her fingertips uncomfortable, Sarah tries to draw her hand away and ask the goblin (she'll really have to ask its name, later) if this was what it's supposed to be like when she accidentally pitches the slightest bit forward. She is pulled all the way through, the feeling of ice washing over her has she goes.

"Why a _mirror?_" She asks nobody in particular, shivering with the chill from the glass. "Last time I went through a window, why not—never mind."

The goblin tugged on her hair, not enough to hurt too much, but certainly not in a manner that could be described as gentle.

"You'll want to start heading that way." It told her, tugging her hair so that she had to turn a bit to her right, and pointing its scrawny hand in the same direction as if she would miss the hint.

"Thanks. What's your name?"

The goblin was silent for a moment, as if deliberating if it should bother speaking to the girl.

"_Please_ tell me your name?"

"Grod." The goblin grunted, though this did not solve the gender question for Sarah—she didn't want to keep calling the goblin an _it_, but she supposed that Grod sounded masculine.

"I'm Sarah." She told him warmly, though she suspected that the little goblin already knew her name. Grod grunted and tugged on her hair again, but decidedly more gently this time.

"Don't go throwing that about."

"What, my name?"

"Names have got power. Make one up if you've got to." Grod still sounds unhappy, probably because Sarah got his name out of him.

Sarah considers this for a second.

"But you told me _yours_ and I had friends here before, they told me their names."

"Then they were fools. Or worse, they _liked_ you." There was a definite sneer in the goblin's voice that Sarah took offence to.

"How is that worse?" She almost snaps, defensive. "I was their friend. They helped me."

"You wouldn't understand. Just don't tell others your name."

"Fine." She grumbles and walks forward in the direction previously established by Grod, swinging her arms by her side for extra balance. The landscape looks unbearably gloomy; few things grow and the earth some to be comprised mostly of sandy, gritty dirt that stick to her winter boots and turn them an odd yellow color. She's incredibly glad that she chose heavy clothes to wear because despite the fact that she dallied about for a while talking to Grod, it is incredibly cold, colder than even the depths of winter at her own home. By now her face is probably already paled with cold and her nose is most likely a bright tomato red.

"Is it always this cold?"

Grod curls up further into her bag and the warmth of her hair as an answer that she takes to be affirmative.

_I don't remember it being this cold when I ran_, she thinks to herself, and frowns. _In fact, I think it may have even been kind of warm._ Actually, it felt more like October when she'd last been there—warm enough to not freeze but cold enough to warrant her long sleeves and jeans.

Her clothing had consisted of a frothy poet's shirt and vest, with jeans and sensible loafers and she had sweat a little, though now that she thought about it, it was most likely due to exertion. Running around in labyrinths was definitely _not_ her favorite activity, so it had been understandable that she wasn't in tip-top shape to do so.

But because she has already completed the labyrinth once, she's confident that she can do it again—and maybe this time she'll listen to the worm and _forget_ the incredibly long time limit, she'd make it in less than an hour. Feeling smug, she squints into the distance.

"Um," is the only thing she can mutter for a second, faltering in her steps. "Where's the labyrinth?" Behind her, wrapped up in her long hair, Grod cackles.

"Didn't you listen?" He chides. "'You must start at the _very edge of my kingdom_ and before Imbolc reach the center of power in the labyrinth.'" It's a near perfect imitation of the Goblin King that makes her jump a little and survey her surroundings, just to make sure that he really isn't there.

"Oh." She sighs, disappointed. In her haste and eagerness to reclaim the children for their families, and Toby and Jillian for her own, she must have completely blocked the _edge of my kingdom_ bit out. _No helping that now_, she tells herself, squaring her shoulders, _you agreed, so you'd better get a move on._

"Do you happen to have any idea of where the center of the power is in the labyrinth?"

"Well…" Sarah considers, looking around her as she starts walking again, "I kind of assumed… that weird room with the staircases? Like my Escher print. I mean, that's where I got Toby back. So I just thought…"

Her explanation tapers off, sounding weak even in her own ears.

"I was set up to fail, wasn't I?"

The realization stings and she tells herself it's simply the cold wind that brings tears to her eyes. She blinks them away, draws in a breath and yells the unfairness of it all. Sarah stamps her foot exactly once, takes in another deep breath, and thrusts her mitten clothed hands into her pockets.

"Are you done?" Grod asks, unperturbed by her display.

Choosing not to reply verbally, Sarah nods her head and resumes her walking pace, trying not to let the cold bother her. She wished she'd brought something to munch on or even to drink, though it would probably be well on its way to freezing by now.

The surrounding scenery offers nothing to comment on; everything is either covered in white, hard snow or frosted over with a covering of ice. The snow has been trodden through, but by nothing that Sarah can identify the prints of. The toes seem to be webbed and they look oddly like human feet without being them at all. Whatever it was that had been walking around must have been dragging something, because in between the footsteps there was a long, but mostly thin line that disappeared every now and then or took an odd curve or flick, sending the softer layer of snow on top elsewhere.

"Grod," she licks her lips. "What makes those kinds of prints?"

"You'll find out," he grunts. It does absolutely nothing to reassure Sarah.

Hoping to skip whatever it is she would find out completely, she speeds up her steps and tries to walk as far away from the footprints in the snow as she can while still being on Grod's course. After ten minutes of walking, the footprints become less and less visible. Sarah breathes a sigh of relief.

There's nothing around her besides the wide open field frosted in white snow and fog that reminds her of the frothy dress she wore in the ballroom dream. Somewhere ahead of her there's a smudge that looks a little too dark to be the roiling fog swallowing her up but she doesn't have any guess as to what it could be. She only hopes that it's the gates to the labyrinth.

Grod is silent and she's not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing; either he's not saying anything because she's on the right path or he's not saying anything because he wants her to fail more miserably than she's sure she is going to anyway.

"How long have I been walking?" She asks, struggling to lift her foot from a particularly deep snowdrift.

"Keep going for half an hour, then you can rest."

"Half of an _hour_?" she protests, almost tripping.

Grod ignores her.

Sarah continues on and soon finds herself in an odd sort of trance, methodically counting steps. It makes it easier to ignore her protesting muscles and some of the chill seeping through her heavy clothes.

Before she knows it Grod is tugging at her hair, shaking her from her reverie.

"You can stop now. Rest under the tree up ahead." The tree in question seems like it's another mile ahead and inwardly Sarah groans a little.

"But it's so _cold_ out, I'll die of hypothermia!"

The little warmth that was Grod disappears from the back of her neck and something that sounds a lot larger than he is lands in the snow next to her.

She looks down and to her right, and immediately stumbles back, tripping in the ankle-deep snow. Staring back at her is a rather large and furry dog that looks something like a cross between a German Shepherd and an Alaskan Malamute. It blinks bright blue eyes and smiles a toothy grin at her, as much as a dog can.

"You… Grod?" Incredulous, she reaches out a hand to stroke a velvety black ear, and the dog wags his tail slightly. Sarah strokes the goblin-turned-dog and wonders if any of her other friends from her run can do something similar.

Grod turns around and in a loping run makes for the tree, stopping a few dozen feet away from Sarah to turn his body halfway around and bark at her. Sarah takes the hint and tries to run after him, precariously balancing herself in the snow. Every now and then he'll dash away from her so that she has to chase after him all over again.

Before she knows it, Grod stands underneath the winter-bare tree wagging his new fluffy tail and she is slumping against the trunk herself, panting breaths of visible air.

He spins in a circle, creating a little hole in the snow and then pushes her into it with his head, growling a little when she tries to move away.

"Thanks Grod, but… How long am I supposed to stay here? I've got kids to save, Goblin Kings to beat. You know… the usual." She yawns and he grunts a little, nosing open her bag and taking one of the granola bars gently in his teeth, dropping it on her lap.

"Th—thanks, Grod, do you want one?"

Instead of answering, he sits down across from her, crosses his paws, and stares her down while she wrestles with the wrapping and her mittens. Eventually she simply tears it open with her teeth.

But the cold has taken its toll; within moments of finishing the bar and settling into the dip in the snow and the tree, Sarah is asleep. Grod curls up next to her, lending warmth.

Sarah does not really dream; the little images that she half-remembers (a crystal, a burst of feathers, sun shining through blooming trees) are gone seconds after she struggles to open her eyes. She struggles because despite the heavy, warm weight of Grod, a thin layer of ice has frosted her eyes shut a little.

The information that her eyes relay to her still sluggish brain snap her eyes shut again.

It's something that seems almost obscenely tall from her vantage point, and whatever it is, it's covered with a soft, short layer of yellow fuzz that turns into a straight-out mane where human hair would be, and trailing down where a human spine would be.

The creature bends over her and Sarah does her best to look as if she's still sleeping. Whatever it is, it's wearing what seems to be a too-large green girdle, so she supposes that it is female.

She smells like water algae and Sarah realizes that she's resorted to holding her breath to get away from the smell, and forces herself to breathe regularly. The bark from the tree digs into the back of her head.

Through her lashes and mostly-closed eyes Sarah can see that she has big, glassy black eyes and the kind of eyelids that reptiles have; Sarah vaguely remembers a freshman Biology lesson that called it a nictitating membrane. The hand that reaches out to touch her shoulder is lightly webbed between the fingers and seems to have thorny little claws as fingernails. Her heart thunders a beat against her ribcage and the focuses on keeping her breathing even.

"I know you're awake."

It's only a statement, not accusing and not particularly surprised.

"You may call me Bana. Get your _púca_ roused and follow me." Sarah swallows, but nudges Grod awake and stands on her own unsteady feet. Her muscles protest the movement.

The creature marks a fast pace that Sarah can't quite keep up with; though Grod could, he keeps her company, steadying her when she stumbles in the snowdrifts.

"What—who are you? What's your name?"

The wind that had before been playful tears the words from her lips; there is no way that the leader of their little mismatched parade could have heard her. Sarah is surprised and a little impressed when it turns around, flicks its eyelids across its eyes once, and motions to a little house connected to a water wheel.

"Inside. Then we may talk."

Not protesting and glad to see that smoke is trailing out of the squat little chimney, Sarah increases her shuffling and catches up to the creature, stepping in through the door that has been held open for her. Grod trots in behind her, but keeps his steady blue gaze on their hostess.

"You may call me Bana." She tells Sarah as soon as the door is latched shut.

"Is that your name?"

"No." Her manner is not sharp but Sarah gets the idea that that particular question was one she should not have asked. Bana motions her over to a chair, which she accepts gratefully.

"You are Sarah."

"I am. How did you know?"

"You _are_ Sarah." Bana says, as if confirming the statement, but Sarah isn't sure if she's talking to herself of if she is supposed to answer the statement. She stays silent.

"I am a _fuath_."

Sarah nods and rubs her hands, hoping to seem knowledgeable.

"You and your _púca_ may stay here for the night, but I expect you to be gone by morning. Look to see which way the sun rises; you will walk that way until you pass a lake. My family will give you the rest of the directions."

"Thank you. Thank you _so_ much, I don't know what I'm doing here, I… it's nice to have friends here again." Sarah flashes Bana a stunning, genuine smile, but the _fuath_ does not seem impressed. The inside of the cabin heats up a little, and Bana's gaze flicks to the fire.

"I suppose it really is you, then." Her tone remains mild, but there's _something_ in her voice.

"What's really me?"

The fire crackles in the background.

"Stay here for a night. Let me show you and the _púca_ to a room."

Bana glides off and Sarah stands to follow, Grod close at her heels, still as the black dog.

The little room that they are showed to feels like home and somehow alien at the same time; there's a thick quilt folded up at the foot the of bed and a little nightstand worn smooth with years of use, and even a singular little circular window above a small dresser.

Bana promises a meal in an hour, bows out, and shuts the door behind her.

Grod leaps to the bed and between the spaces of Sarah's breaths, is a little goblin again.

"You're doing well so far, Sarah."

"I haven't done _anything_." She protests. "I don't even know how far I've gone since I started."

"Irrelevant."

"Well _I_ don't think so." Sarah grumbles, throwing herself down on the provided bed. It smells like fresh straw and she breathes in deeply.

"She is going to ask you something."

"Okay." Her voice is muffled because she has the pillow in a death grip against her face, trying to absorb the warmth.

"You are going to say yes."


	8. Questions

What Bana offers Sarah is deliciously warm and colorful, and what's even better, she can _taste_ it. Though beef stew never truly had been her favorite meal, Sarah finds herself eating it with a relish that she hadn't been able to muster for months. Bana sat back and refilled her bowl when necessary. For the most part, the_ fuath_ ignored Grod, offhandedly offering him food as if she had forgotten he was there.

"Thank you very much. This is delicious!"

"It isn't." Bana tells her matter-of-factly. "You have simply been starving yourself for real food for too long."

"I've eaten," Sarah says defensively, "I just haven't been all that hungry. But I _have_ eaten." She spoons another steaming bite into her mouth.

Bana blinks and smiles, managing a fair imitation of the Mona Lisa.

"I am sure you've been eating _food_. What I did say was that you have been neglecting to eat _real_ food. There is a difference, Sarah."

She waits for elaboration, but Bana stands and ladles more food into Sarah's bowl.

"I don't _normally_ eat this much, but I am hungry now. Thank you." She tells her host again with a little smile.

"It is understandable, girl. You are changing, you need your strength. If you so desire, I can pack you the food that will keep you in good health for your journey, but I will ask you something in return."

Sarah shrugs and wipes her mouth.

"I don't see why not. What is it that you want?"

Bana threads her webbed fingers together in an odd manner and leans on the bridge that they make.

"I must ask you not to fear my family, when you meet them. They are not quite as I am." Sarah raises an eyebrow but nods. She'd have to get directions from them anyway, so she might not even have to stay there too long.

"And before you leave tomorrow morning, I must also ask you to break the ice near the water wheel and take a drink."

"That doesn't sound hard or anything. Why do you want me to do that?"

Bana gives another secretive smile and motions out the window behind Sarah.

"It is right out there. Remember, I must ask you to leave early in the morning."

Grod shifts beside her and pushes his own meal away, settling into his seat at the table. They had to find books and pillows and things for him to sit on because the chair simply had not been designed for a being of his stature; Sarah couldn't be completely sure if it was this that was bothering him or something else. If she could be sure that he wouldn't bite off her fingers, she would like to pet him to perhaps calm him down like it would Merlin. Instead she shifts her attention back to Bana.

"What purpose would drinking from the stream serve?" She asks again, hoping that she'll actually get an answer this time. If Bana wouldn't give her one, she isn't sure what she can do; either she thanks the _fuath_ for her generous help by doing the simple task asked of her or she doesn't. The favor in itself seems sort of strange to Sarah because she simply can't fathom how it could possibly help the_ fuath_. Could it be that she hated humans and the water would make her ill? …But that doesn't make sense because she's already been so much help; if Bana had wished Sarah harm she could have simply left her in the snow and ice. Instead she's been offered a warm meal and bed, so Sarah is almost completely sure it's not that Bana has any ill will towards her.

Bana laughs lightly, so that if Sarah hadn't been waiting for an answer she probably would have missed it completely.

"I am being purely selfish, Sarah. I wish for you to bless my stream by drinking from it. Do not worry; it is probably the safest and purest water you will find within the kingdom. Well," she admits after brief consideration, "perhaps the exception is King Jareth's castle. I am simply tired of winter; I long for summer to come." She adds after a thought, bearing a small grimace.

"Mmm." Sarah mumbles, not sure how to respond. She doesn't remember drinking any of the water (as far as she knows, the only thing she ever consumed within the kingdom was the bite of the peach) but she _knows_ she doesn't remember the entire ballroom dream—or at least she's pretty sure. It had seemed like only a few minutes had gone by but it had taken hours from her allotted time. Not to mention it dumped her in the—well, _dump_. At least it had brought her closer to the castle (and Toby) so she supposes that she can't complain too much, despite the lost time.

"How could I possibly bless your stream? I haven't got any… special powers or anything." She denies, shaking her head a little and rising to wash her bowl in the little sink across the room. Bana raises an off yellow hand to stop her and takes it herself.

"Thank you." Sarah adds.

"This land is different from your own. You are different here, and you will attract a lot of attention, Sarah."

"Because I'm human?"

"Because you are _Sarah_." Bana tells her, turning her back to wash the bowl. Sarah can see her tail swinging lazily back and forth beneath her girdle. "You are more than you know here."

"Why?" Sarah asks, Bana's words sounding especially ominous without a facial expression to compare the tone to.

"You've beaten the labyrinth, have you not?"

"Yeah," Sarah snorts. "And a fat lot of good that did me." Frustrated again, she sighs and slumps further into her chair.

"Ignore the outcome," Bana instructs, and Sarah scowls. "The only thing that matters here is that you _did_ beat it. Many have tried, Sarah, but none before you have succeeded."

"Really?" Sarah asks, slightly mollified. "What happened to the other runners, then?"

Bana gracefully lifts her shoulders and lets them fall in what is probably the most subtle shrug that Sarah has ever witnessed.

"It is not for me to know, but it is said that the king sent some home in disgrace, they did so miserably. Others became Junk Girls, or Revelers."

Nervous, Sarah clears her throat.

"You mean that those people… Ladies… Junk Girls?" Bana nods in confirmation. "Those Junk Girls were once... runners? They're not a kind of goblin or anything?" The _fuath_ blinks but nods slightly.

"And those people in the ballroom, they were too? But they all looked so…" She screws up her face, thinking of how to describe them. "I didn't think that they looked like runners."

Sarah feels ill; she'd almost been caught in the junkyard, so she probably almost became one of the Junk Girls.

She spent quite a lot of time and almost forgot to remember to leave the ballroom, so she almost became one of the Revelers.

"Not all of them were. Some of the other fey enjoy their company, so it is not uncommon for them to temporarily join the Revel."

"Oh." The color drains out of her face; Sarah knows because she can feel it. "So I almost… I was almost _both_ of them, oh no…"

The memory of her trancelike state both times sets her hear to hammering and a series of what-ifs stampeding through her min.

_What if I didn't see the clock?_

_What if there had been no chairs?_

_What if the fall knocked me out in the junkyard?_

_What if my friends hadn't been there?_

_What if—_

"But you did not get taken in, Sarah. That is what matters. The now nonexistent futures that you _could_ have had are no longer important."

Sarah nods, trying to quell the new panic inside her. Bana was right, though; she smashed the ballroom dream and escaped, and when she was about to be absorbed into the junkyard, she had heard her friends' calls and woken up. And from there, she went victoriously on to reclaim her brother. As long as she looked at it that way, it seemed golden.

But it seems that her reward for thwarting the labyrinth and the Goblin King was having not only her brother and cousin, but other children stolen just to draw her out again. And that, she decides, is what is happening. There was no reason that he should be able to do this because after all, he had no power over her.

Except that he seems to have found a loophole in that particular clause. Sarah frowns.

Why would he care? Sure, Bana had just told her that she was the only one to successfully run through the labyrinth and reclaim their wished-away, but surely he wasn't _that _childish?

_Well_, she thinks wryly, _just look at the occupants of his castle. They hardly seem to be the paragons of maturity_.

Hoggle had a child's petulance, Ludo perhaps the vocabulary. Sir Didymus had either an old warrior's delusion or a child's obstinacy that nothing could go wrong in his world. Grod, while at least pretending to be a little more mature than the general population of goblins she's come across so far, is bossy and a bit of a bully.

In Bana though, she can't seem to find any of this, but she had only known the _fuath_ for a little upwards of an hour.

So maybe that Goblin King _was_ that juvenile, and coupled with his powers that made him extremely dangerous.

It sounds logical to Sarah, so she accepts it as fact, but it does not comfort her. After all, he's already proven himself to _be_ just that; dangerous and perhaps malicious too, and though she can reason to herself that he's just like the goblins he rules, he also seems oddly mature at the same time. Sarah isn't sure how she can make the imbalances work in her thoughts and it frustrates her greatly. She isn't sure how to handle him or any of the situations he gives her because even in her own mind, how she thinks of him is inconstant.

Is he seeking some odd sort of sore-loser's revenge?

Or is he, a treacherously thrilled part of her thinks, angry that she slipped his grasp and seeking to reclaim her, like some of the male leads in Karen's cheesy convenience store romance novels?

"I think," Bana tells her quietly, "it may be time for you to rest. Your _púca_ is already sleeping." Surprised, Sarah turns to where Grod had been sitting quietly next to her. The furry little goblin is indeed sleeping, head lolling back, mouth wide open.

"I guess it is. Thank you so much, Bana." Smiling again at the _fuath_, Sarah picks Grod up and makes her way to the room provided for her.

She places Grod down on the extra pillow, rolls under the covers herself, and is asleep before she can even consider changing clothes.

The morning sun is bright in her eyes, and is what wakes Sarah up. Grod is still passed out on the pillow beside her, curled up like a cat. She can hear no other sounds in the house besides deep breathing, so she slips out from beneath the covers and leaves the room, heading to where she and Bana spoke last night.

Sitting on the table was a new bag, and when she peeked inside, she saw wrapped packages of dried meat, aged cheese, little rolls, and dried fruit. Things that, for the most part, would keep well for a lengthy journey. Just how big was the Goblin Kingdom, anyway?

She stuffs the bag into the one she brought herself as best she can and goes back to wake Grod.

By the time she reopens the door, Grod is up and pinning her with his cerulean gaze.

"It's time to go, I guess." She says, and he nods, scampering from the bed and back onto her shoulder.

"Bana gave us food, so I guess I've got to go to the water." She can feel Grod nod, so she mumbles a general thank you out into the air, strides through the little kitchen and back to the cold outside.

The water, though frozen, is highly visible; the large creek (or small river?) cuts a swath of glittering ice through the landscape. Sarah stumbles through the snow again and then comes to the side of the river, testing the strength of the ice with a booted foot. At the edges, it cracks easily.

Crouching down, she can feel the cold seeping through her layers of clothing and decides to make her sip of the water fast.

It's cold, of course, and it numbs her mouth a bit but it tastes sweet and clear, unlike nay water she's tasted before. The water ices over again almost as soon as she is done.

"Time to leave. Head for the sun." Grod instructs, and settles himself back to his familiar position of her now bulging bag of supplies. Sarah follows his orders, resigning herself as she does to be doing it through her whole journey.

She doesn't really want to question Grod's directions or Bana's odd desires but she knows that she isn't in her element here; she didn't know the name rule that Grod insists is important and she somehow managed to offend Bana with it almost as soon as she met her, she still doesn't understand it and Grod's explanation that "words have power" didn't clear much up for her.

Her footprints already span out a distance away from Bana's little cottage and water wheel and she can't help but to wonder if she's being helped along speed wise. For what had to have been the fifteen minutes she'd already been walking, the trail that she left behind ran seemingly far too long.

"How long will it take to get to Bana's family?" She asks Grod, already shivering from the cold.

"How should I know? It's not _my_ family. And I don't make it common practice to visit _fuaths_ either."

"Bana was nice." Sarah sniffs, feeling the need to defend the kindly stranger. "What's so bad about _fuaths_?"

Grod grunts and shakes his head a little, curling around in a circle tighter against her neck.

"If you're looking for _fuaths_, I'd stick by water," he eventually tells her, but she can feel that his fur is on end. She considers trying to reassure him, but doesn't understand his concern. Bana was a _fuath_ and Bana had been kind. Though there was that warning that she had been given, to not be afraid of Bana's family. Given to her by Bana herself, no less.

"Grod, I know that you said you don't visit _fuaths_, but do they all look like Bana?" She asks, keeping her voice low to minimize the heat she wastes. Behind her, Grod sighs and shuffles again. He does not answer immediately, but she can feel his breath on the small back of her neck that was uncovered with either clothing or her long hair.

"Most of them look something similar."

Considering this, Sarah frowns slightly.

"But Bana didn't want me to be afraid of her family; I assumed that she meant they looked even more… different than she did."

"What's so bad about _fuaths_?" He spits back at her. "And anyway _you_ actually look more out of place here than any _fuath_, or _púka_ or even _dullahan_. Just keep that in mind." Sarah shrugs, bumping Grod around a little. She doesn't know what a _dullahan_ is and only knows that Grod is a _púca_ because Bana had called him such. But she doesn't want to ask, just in case she raises his ire even more; she is pretty sure that he's irritated enough with all of her questions.

"And what…" she begins, trying to keep from licking her lips because she knows they will crack, "what about Jareth?"

"Jareth? You want to know about Jareth?" Grod sounds oddly eager, like her question managed to lift him out of whatever funk he had managed to land in. She can feel his calloused little fingertips grasping eagerly at her skin; he's trying to gain leverage so that he can twist around to face her. When he is able to peer around to face her, he isn't smiling, but he's certainly not scowling or frowning. His bright eyes peer into hers and she feels a little like a bug pinned under a microscope.

"N—no."

"But you just asked," a keening noise erupts from his throat and she assumes he's whining.

"I was just _curious_—you know, everything else is a goblin, he's the _Goblin_ King, but he's… not really a goblin, is he?"

Grod's tail whips back and forth, opening sweeping gaps in her hair and allowing chilly gusts of wind to reach her. Maybe she's irritated him again, and maybe she didn't like how he was so eager to her to show an interest in his king. Though she tries to justify it to herself—she's not really interested in _him_, more like his situation, and _besides_, he's her enemy right now _and _the reason she was so cold and uncomfortable was _all_ his fault.

"And there are the Revelers too, I remember them being… humanlike, but Bana told me that they were past runners."

"So you're not interested in the runners?"

"No, I know about them." She sighs, frustration growing.

"But you _do_ want to know about Jareth?"

"Well," fidgeting, Sarah tries to piece together the words she means. "Yes—no, not really, but… Kind of? I want to know why he's a Goblin King but not obviously a goblin. And that's _it_." She adds for emphasis, just in case Grod got the wrong message again.

Grod emits a strangled noise that Sarah would equate to one of her own mixes of a grunt and a sigh.

"You're too curious for your own good."

* * *

><p><strong>AN  
><strong>If you got an update for this earlier and there wasn't anything actually new, well... I'm an idiot. Sorry about that!


	9. Gamble

"Y-you know," Sarah begins, teeth chattering, "you could have warned me about that… drop-off." It isn't the word she's looking for but it will have to do. The ground that she had slowly been stumbling on had suddenly disappeared, and Sarah had found herself rapidly falling through a layer of forest debris, snow, and ice.

The fall hadn't been that long, but it _was _long enough to rekindle the pain in her ankle; Sarah hoped that she hadn't strained or sprained it again, and she tests it gingerly while Grod watches. It still stings.

"I was in the process of it." He tells her slowly, picking tree branch out from between his teeth. He'd had to find a particularly long tree branch and help to hoist her out of the pit in his dog shape.

"But it is hardly my fault that you walk much too quickly—as if you owned the place, I tell you—and choose to ignore a friendly warning."

Sarah sputters and stops dead in her tracks. "I do not walk as if I _own_ this—"

"And _then_," he continues as if she had not been speaking, "you berate me for jumping to safety. If I hadn't done that, how would you possibly have gotten out?"

Scowling, Sarah resumes her progress, doing her best to brush more of the dead leaves and twigs out of her hair. Grod helps occasionally with his nimble fingers but gives up whenever Sarah walks.

"So you see, I wasn't looking out for myself; I was in fact looking towards your best interests. Like I am now. Two steps to your right," he instructs, and Sarah follows his directive, not wanting to fall into another pit.

"Oubliette!" She gasps while pulling a particularly tangled twig from her hair.

"What about it?" Grod asks lazily from behind her; she ignores the slight laughter evident in his voice.

"That's the word! Oh, I wonder why I forgot. But it wasn't like the other one, not nearly as bad and—Grod, why are there oubliettes out here? I thought that there were only oubliettes in the labyrinth."

Grod flicks his tail and Sarah shivers again, waiting for an answer.

"You and your assumptions," he scoffs. "Why would they be confined to the labyrinth?"

"I—I just thought… I mean they don't seem like something you'd keep in the countryside… People could get _hurt_ and then have nothing but an irritable _púca_ to help drag them out of the oubliette, but only after they've screamed at said _púca_ for a good few minutes and they're thoroughly covered in dying leaves and snow. Which is _cold_," she tells him pointedly. "Could you stop swinging your tail?"

"Fine."

"Thanks." She tells him gruffly, trying to settle down deeper into her layers of coats.

She shuffles along through the snow, stepping gingerly lest she manage to find another oubliette, and gradually comes to the conclusion that Grod is not going to continue to speak to her.

After what she could consider a ridiculous amount of silence, Grod finally speaks.

"Just so that you know, the oubliettes _are_ confined to the labyrinth."

Her lips seem to be covered with a layer of frost that makes them difficult to move, but eventually she manages it.

"What do you mean, they're contained to the labyrinth? We're not _in_ the labyrinth." She displays this fact by throwing out her arms and spinning around a little bit, making herself and probably Grod dizzy in the process.

"Not anymore. Had you come a few hundred years ago, you would have been." He snapped, clutching the back of her neck.

"And they didn't bother to get rid of the oubliettes around here? Fill them in? It just seems kind of careless to let them open like that." And Sarah didn't even want to think of how deep they had originally been if a few hundred _years_ worth of debris had broken her fall; the oubliette had still been a good fifteen feet deep.

"It was not the king's decision to remove the labyrinth from this part of the land at the time; he had just lost his queen and a good chunk of his power, the magic was beginning to drain away because of the lost queen, and this part of the labyrinth could not be maintained."

"Mmm," Sarah tries not to lick her lips, keeping them firmly shut because she can feel them cracking.

"But why would the queen leaving bother the king's magic?" She asks. "Why would that drain the rest of the magic in the land?"

"I'm _telling_ you." Grod snapped impatiently. "Why can't you just—"

He takes a deep breath and lets it out, striving for what Sarah assumes is patience.

"The queen was lost and her magic, her _summer_, went with her. The queen was the king's—"

"Soulmate?" Sarah interrupts.

"_Counterpart_, but I suppose that soulmate works just as well. They balanced each other, sharing equal power and making sure that neither gained the upper hand for too long. But without balance, things… decay. The king was winter, to balance the queen's summer, and you can see how well that treated this land." Grod snorts and changes his position around Sarah's neck.

"Most inhabitants would probably kill to have summer back, even those not within King Jareth's rule. The absence of the Summer Queen has spread beyond these borders and other nations felt the drain of the magic. Their lands reacted, trying to pull magic in for their monarchs."

"How?" Sarah asked, not fully confident that this wellspring of information that Grod had suddenly turned into would continue. To her relief, it did.

"Not every monarch had found their counterpart—they existed, of course, but they had yet to be united. The lands reached out and found them."

"But—"

"Be wary now, the _fuath's_ family is up ahead. I can smell them." Grod clearly did not want to continue the conversation, though Sarah did very badly, she let it go. For now.

"Where are they?" She breathes and not knowing why, she crouches down to hide behind a bush.

"Another mile ahead, I'd say. They'll be around water. There's a lake around here somewhere."

"A mile ahead? That's not that helpful, Grod." She snaps a little peevishly, standing up. "Can't you just tell me where they are when we get closer?"

"If you wish it," the little goblin mumbles, settling himself more comfortably into her hair. Sarah gets the uneasy suspicion that he is falling asleep.

"Hey," she whispers, a cloud of steam coming out with the word, "I still need you to get me through this minefield of oubliettes." For good measure she shrugs a bit too, hoping to wake him. He is silent, though, either ignoring her or actually asleep. Sarah moves on through the deep snow, stepping gingerly and hoping that she'll be lucky enough to miss all of the rest of the oubliettes.

"You're not going to find another," Grod tells her after she jumps over a suspicious-looking patch of earth. "You're out of the oubliette section. I _did_ tell you that we were coming up to the _fuaths_ soon, didn't I?"

"Glad to see you've woken up," Sarah tells him, only a little sarcastically. "But why would the _fuaths_ be _after_ the oubliettes? Why would they be considered a challenge? Bana was nice enough. I mean, sure, I guess if you weren't used to seeing non-humans…" Sarah's explanation trails off and she hopes that Grod can catch her meaning.

"That's because Bana is not really a _fuath_. She looks remarkably like one, I will give her that, but it's the cabin that gives her away. _Fuaths_ have to live _in_ water, Sarah."

"Then what _is_ Bana?" Sarah asks, taken aback, and suddenly more nervous about the_ fuaths _up ahead. "And why would she lie about her family?"

Grod sighs as if Sarah is the world's most ignorant person and she won't stop asking obvious questions. Sarah huffs and jostles him intentionally.

"She _can't_ lie. Twist the truth, yes. Omit facts, yes. Lead you in the wrong direction, certainly. But she cannot lie. Nobody in this world can, unless they desire the repercussions. Except for you, right now," the goblin adds as if it were an afterthought. "Bana is half human."

"So you can't either?" Sarah asks, trying to sound innocent.

"No."

"And neither can the Goblin King?" She continues in the same overly innocent manner.

"I believe that he would prefer it that you call him Jareth. But he cannot."

Sarah barely manages to resist the urge to laugh maniacally, feeling relieved though she doesn't quite know why. She supposes that it does make her feel a lot safer that he can't outright lie to her and neither can Grod, while she can fib and get away with it without any of the apparent repercussions that the fey suffered from. The only thing that she will have to be on her toes about is manipulation, but now that she knows to look for it, she feels slightly more secure.

The only that that she does not like is the fact that she knows the Goblin King _is_ adept at the manipulation of his surroundings and beings he happens to be around.

Perhaps her in particular.

In fact, he'd manipulated her all the way here, hadn't he? He'd forced her hand in a particularly galling way and now he had her where he wanted her, she presumed, wherever _that_ was. This new little nugget of understanding unnerves her and she is almost glad that she can feel Grod stiffen behind her.

"I can smell them. You'll be able to soon too. Keep quiet; try to avoid them for as long as you can."

"But Bana said—" Sarah began, Grod's nervousness sweeping over her and making her own anxiety skyrocket. She can feel her pulse quicken.

"I don't care what Bana said. We're going to avoid them for _as long as possible_. If we don't see them at all and we don't get their directions, so be it. We can find out own way. You've got until Imbolc, haven't you?"

"But I've got to traipse across the _country!_" Sarah reminds him, alarmed. "We need the directions, Jareth—the Goblin King wants me to lose, I know it, he…" Her sentence peters out and she sucks in her breath, trying to keep the taste of the scent wafting through the air from overwhelming her.

"He doesn't want you—" Grod begins under his breath, but Sarah cuts him off, her own frantic voice louder than his in the frozen air.

"_What is that smell?_"

"Various molds. Sludge from the water. And the _fuaths_ in general." Sarah wrinkles her nose and claps a mittened hand over the lower half of her face, disgusted.

"Why do they let themselves smell so horrible?" She asks Grod, not sure she actually wants that question answered.

"They happen to enjoy the smell. If you come across one, do not mention it, and do not show any signs of displeasure." Sarah nods, still wishing to keep her mouth closed.

"Now move. Try to be quiet."

Sarah follows Grod's directives and tries her best to walk quietly through the snow, tiptoeing her way and trying to ignore the crunching noise the snow makes as she steps through the top layer.

The wind dies down and Grod seems to relax just the slightest bit. The trees loom tall and craggy over Sarah's head, adding to the image of a picturesque forest. A clump of snow falls off of a branch behind her and Sarah tries not to wince, imagining a band of the _fuaths_ that Grod seemed to be so afraid of behind her.

Dragging herself between two trees and through high lumps in the snow that must be the ancient roots beneath, Sarah comes into view of a pond, rather on the large side, glittering in a thick layer of ice under the sun.

"Just get past the pond. They live in water," Grod warns, coiling himself around Sarah's neck, as if he expected something that Sarah did not.

"O—okay," she tells him, nodding a little and shivering with something more than cold. Haltingly, she makes her way over to the pond, her steps growing faster as she gets closer, eager to be away from it. The smell of the _fuaths_, smelling more of rot the closer she gets, is almost overpowering and getting more so as she draws nearer. She wants to wrinkle her nose or to hold a hand of it, but is wary of Grod's warning from before.

She breathes a little sigh of relief as she starts to pull away from the water's edge and enter back into the trees.

"It looks like you're gotten away." Grod tells her, sighing in his own relief. He drapes himself over her shoulders as if his anxiety has worn him out.

A second later, a cracking sound forces Sarah's curiosity. The girl whips around, stumbling momentarily in the deep snow, just in time to see…

Absolutely nothing.

Figuring that it was just a branch breaking under the weight of snow and ice, Sarah resumes her forward, stumbling pace as best as she can. The smell is growing worse, even though she is walking away from the pond. And there's the strangest sound of something _following_ her, but she pushes it from her mind. She's just looked behind her, and nothing was there. Besides, this was hardly one of those horror movies where the heroine (at least, the temporary one) got stalked by something that she couldn't track or catch hold of…

Though this might be the story, and in fact has already proven itself to be the story in which the heroine's ignorance is taken advantage of. And there's danger all around, if even Grod, a resident of the Labyrinth, was afraid of the _fuaths_.

She shivers again and picks up her pace.

"Go slowly," Grod instructs. "There's something behind us, act like you don't know." His voice is barely audible and even though the area is pretty much silent, she has to strain to hear him.

Sarah doesn't reply verbally and she doesn't nod, following Grod's commands and acting as if she didn't know that there was something there, going from tree to tree behind her as she walked. The sound of crunching snow that was not her own footsteps quickens and Sarah struggles to keep her pace even and not break into whatever run she can manage in the snow.

"Halt, human girl."

The voice has a strangely hissing, piercing aspect, but it sounds almost smeared, as if it were not meant to be spoken above water or shouted over long distances. Sarah gulps and stops, turning around slowly to face the speaker. Grod hides himself deeper in her hair.

"You dare to pass through the realm of the _fuath_ and not pay your respects?" The _fuath_ advances, and Sarah can see that Bana was not a true one; she looked far too human, though Grod said that she had been good at hiding it. This _fuath_ was also covered in yellow fur and had large, cloudy black eyes but its mouth was a violent slash in its face and it was missing a nose, a gaping fissure taking its place where it should be. A powerful, sleek tail swung in agitation behind it.

"I'm sorry, I didn't know," Sarah tells it, trying not to breathe in, especially through her mouth.

"Typical human," the _fuath_ scoffs, advancing towards Sarah. "Completely ignorant. But I suppose," it continues, harsh mouth twisting into some sort of wry, mocking smile, "that's just how the runners are. Come."

And with one swinging, graceful motion, it turns and walks back to the pond. Grod does not chime in to give advice, though Sarah wishes that he would; she doesn't know if she should actually follow the creature or run as fast and far away as she can. With nothing better to do, she follows.

At the pond, more _fuaths_ have assembled; they keep moving, but Sarah guesses that there must be at least five now, not including the one that had come after her in the forest. Her heart beats a rhythm against her chest.

The movement of the true _fuaths_ is predatory, all slinky and fluid and somewhat reminiscent of Bana's, though she had given off the impression that she had tripped at least once in her life. As Sarah drew nearer, the _fuaths_ all turned their attention to her. Their inky gaze was intimidating, especially so when none of them spoke up. The six of them continued to stare without emotion, and Sarah could not tell if their gaze was one of contemplation or anger.

"Uh. Hello." Sarah tells them, trying to be polite.

"I _knew_ I smelled a human," the _fuath_ farthest to the right spat. "We could smell your stench from ages away, human Sarah."

"Oh," is all that she can say, not wanting to comment on _their_ malodorous calling card.

"Though you don't stink as horribly as other humans that have come this way, bumbling beasts." It's meant to be a compliment, Sarah can tell by the tone, she but she is unsure of how to receive it properly.

"Thank you?"

The _fuaths_ snigger at what she guesses is her expense.

"You know, you stink something like the Summer Queen did," one mused, to the revulsion of the _fuath_ farthest to the right, the continually scowling one.

"Don't talk about her. She abandoned us." The tone of hatred in the _fuath's_ voice startles Sarah and she actually does take a step back, away from the _fuath_, but the one that had led her back to the pond steps behind her and pushes her closer to the rest of them again, closer than she even had been before.

The angry one from the right steps closer, testing the air with the hole in its face.

"You still smell too human yet to be the Summer Queen, traitorous b—"

"The _poor_ Winter King," sighs a middle one. "Left to deal with the frost, with no help. _So_ sad, all of the time…" That _fuath_ too steps closer and Sarah steps away to her left, closer to the half frozen pond.

"Winter King?" Sarah asks, almost afraid of the answer.

"Ignorant miss. He goes by the Goblin King now. Too much winter here, he's afraid that the title would offend his subject and those… affected by the chill." They advance again and Sarah finds that she is being backed in closer to the pond.

"I'm sorry, I didn't know; I'm not from here."

One _fuath_ to her left snorts in disgust and leaps at her. Sarah can feel her right boot enter the water, can feel the sudden chill that the water brings with it, and she can see the odd, ruthless smiles that the _fuaths_ around her all wear.

"Where's your pet _púca?_" One _fuath_ asks, and Grod shifts deeper into Sarah's heavy coat. "We heard you were travelling with one. Don't humans usually take things that are not theirs?"

"I don't have a pet _púca_," she tells the _fuath_ firmly, adopting a scowl of her own. "And maybe you'd _know_ humans if you didn't scare them off with your manners and your _stink_."

A deadly silence follows her words, and Sarah can feel her heart drop.

"You're the one that stinks, human."

"I've been holding my breath the entire time," she informs the _fuath_ who had just spoken flippantly.

All at once they hiss and spring forward in a motion that Sarah can't follow. They fall upon her and Sarah's shriek is cut off with icy water that fills her mouth and lungs.

**A/N**  
>This took a loooong time, for which I am sorry for, but I'm averaging about five hours of homework a night right now.<p> 


	10. Water

The first thing that Sarah can consciously think is that the lights are _way too bright._ The second is that she is _way_ underdressed for whatever shindig is going on.

Sarah doesn't know where Grod has gone—he should have been on her shoulders, like he normally was, but for the first time in a few days, she didn't have his weight around her neck.

"Grod?" Sarah calls out, but the fluffy snow all around her seems to muffle her words. It's weird—like that one time she had a horrible fever. She was six at the time and experienced the world like she had cotton balls stuffed in her ears, in her eyes. It is kind of like that now; the images she sees seem like they are delayed and the sound seems off slightly. She knows that it should be cold because of the snow on the ground but can't bring herself to actually feel it. Even her feet seem to be lagging behind her.

She stumbles through the snow, calling out for Grod and hoping that he hasn't gotten lost or is hiding from her and ignoring her increasingly frantic calls.

"_Grod!_" she finally screams, stamping her feet in the snow. "Answer me! Please!"

From behind a dense patch of trees, she hears distant laughter. It sounds like it's coming from a large group of people and now that she knows to listen she thinks that she can hear music, too. It's a flowing kind that, to her untrained ear, seems as if it were changing tempo every now and then.

The music sounds almost classical—like a waltz, or something to be danced to—but it doesn't sound even remotely familiar, and Sarah knows a lot of classical music because it is—was—the only thing Karen ever played because she read an article once that said something about it making babies smarter.

She turns towards it and faces another wall of trees, growing so closely together that she can just barely see through them. Briefly, she wonders if she'll be able to get through, and if that's the way she's supposed to go at all.

But of course it is; it's right across from the pond she's now walking away from and that's _definitely_ where the music is coming from, and if she focuses and peeks between ancient tree trunks, she thinks she can see little lights.

"Hello?" she calls out, hoping that they're somebody's lanterns.

They're too big to be fireflies and the wrong color because they glow like stars, not with the yellow-green haze that the insects do—and besides, it's too cold out for it to be any sort of bug. Sarah frowns, remembering _something_ from those book about floating lights—_will 'o the wisps?_ she thinks—but she's in a snow covered forest, which while is odd in itself because the snow _shouldn't_ have been able to reach the ground, it is still not a swamp, which is where the fairy-lights were supposed to appear.

So they're probably not will 'o the wisps, she tells herself.

The little lights glitter and shimmer in the spaces between the trees and, sensing that there might be at least _somebody_ that she could ask, Sarah trudges on.

She had been right about the trees—they _were_ difficult to maneuver through and her bag kept getting caught on low branches and what dead leaves there were still clinging for life to the trees got caught in her hair. The roots of the ancient trees tripped her up. If she didn't know better she would almost think that they were doing it on purpose.

There's another bubble of laughter from behind the barrier of trees that assures her she's going in the right direction. The strange music picks up and now sounds almost like something that would come from a little girl's music box, one of those oddly fluffy pink affairs that has a little clockwork ballerina twirling inside.

It sounds familiar and she purses her lips together, trying to remember why it does, because it's not something that Karen had ever played, she knows that at least, and Sarah doesn't like it enough to have bought it on an album or something, not that she really has too many of those anyway.

With one final push between two particularly rough and stubborn trees, Sarah stumbles her way into what looks like a particularly busy clearing.

Nobody turns around to greet her entrance because whoever they are, they are all far too busy drinking what looks to be some sort of bubbly amber or pink wine, laughing or dancing. Some spin in mad circles that make Sarah dizzy. It's far too dark to see what matter of being they are because there are only a few will 'o the wisps lurking about, though they seem to be drawn to the occasion because more are filtering through the trees as Sarah watches.

All at once, she remembers where she heard the strains of the song before—during the summer, in her weird half-dream, though now she realizes the pillars are massive trees—and she shifts uncomfortably.

A twig snaps underneath her boot and echoes like a gunshot in the clearing. The creatures closest to where she is standing turn around, glasses in hands, and look her over.

"Come over here, darling," one tells her, gesturing with a hand motion. Sarah shakes her head, suddenly nervous, and a woman with frizzy brown hair beside her giggles. Another glides forward, closing the middling distance between them and takes Sarah's arm gently in her own, smiling as she does so. Sarah tries to smile back, but manages only a weak quirk of her lips.

"We don't bite," the woman laughs, peering down at Sarah from her height, tossing silky brown hair behind her.

"And we'll keep you safe," a short, bubbly blonde offers. "We know why you're here."

"Don't worry—it's all happened to all of us at some point," another assures her, rolling what looks to be a cane between her hands.

"That's why we're here," finishes a woman with a wild mane of short black hair. They all nod at once, and Sarah's eye widen at the sight.

"Who are you?" she asks, apprehension thick on her tongue. She looks between all of the women assembled and notices that they all look human, though some seem to have slightly pointed ears.

"We're Revelers," another blonde tells her, piercing her with startling eyes composed of blue, green and grey. Sarah shrugs, the information not truly clearing anything up for her. Did it really have to be so difficult to get a straight answer from anybody down in the Underground?

"I don't know what that means," she says, trying to address all of them at once.

"We're stuck here," pipes up a woman with hair so brilliantly red Sarah wonders if it's real or not. "We couldn't complete the labyrinth."

"Some of us gave up," the woman with the cane tells her, shrugging. "Some of us liked the idea of… staying."

"And some of us ran out of time," informs the woman with the startling eyes. Sarah just now notices that she's wearing some sort of frothy gown made out of a sugary pink fabric and that the rest of them are wearing dresses in something of the same style.

"Most of us got stuck _here_, in that ballroom dream," the girl with the black hair sighs, waving her hand around in a lazy circle as if to indicate the entire party.

"So we're Revelers," the red-headed woman said, and bit her lip a little.

"But at least we're not _Junk Girls_."

There is a quiet murmur of agreement between all of the women assembled. Sarah shrugs, assuming that she'll probably understand later.

She looks around. There are still people—or fey—dancing or drinking or just generally socializing, and aside from the women that she has been talking with, nobody else seems to have noticed her. They are all far too busy doing whatever they have been.

"How long as his revel been going on?" Sarah asks, still looking around. There seems to be a couple getting rather intimate, and her cheeks burn crimson as she looks away as fast as she can.

"Oh, we don't know," the short blonde tells her. "It could have existed forever, or just since the first of us got stuck here."

"Either way," says the lady with frizzy brown hair and glasses, "it's been a long time. We're just the newer arrivals, too. The original Revelers…"

"They've forgotten where they are," said the woman with the short red hair, with an accompanying nervous lip bite. "They've forgotten who they are now."

"All they know is the Revel," explained the woman in the pink dress. "It's kind of sad, but I guess it happens to us all."

Sarah pales and takes a step back, as if to distance herself from the Revelers.

"Not to _me_," she tells them vehemently. "I got out. I smashed the wall with a—"

"Chair. We know; we were there the first time," the girl with black hair nods. "And let me tell you, _that_ woke us up."

"Oh," Sarah mumbles, not sure what to say or if that was a good thing or not.

"But congratulations on getting out and making it through the labyrinth. I guess the king has finally found you, then," the tall brunette shrugs.

"And you're _her_, so when you're sitting on your fancy throne, don't forget about us, okay?" the girl with glasses laughs.

_The water is freezing cold, picking at her skin through the clothes that drag her down. She loses a boot first and then the bag almost slips out of her grasp._

"_What?"_ Sarah squawks, eyes bugging out. She reels in place for a minute, not sure where the vision came from. The cold is still crawling along her skin, and she shivers a little.

"Well, of course. You're the one he's been looking for. It's been so _long_."

"You're coming along nicely, by the way. The transformation is taking really well to you."

_She looks around but can't see much; the light shifts with the water and she can't tell up from down. A breath escapes from between her lips and she follows their movement skywards._

"I—I don't…" Sarah shakes her head and puts a hand over her forehead. She can't tell who is talking now and she's becoming disoriented, not sure where she should look or to whom she should talk.

"Poor Summer Queen," somebody sighs, and places a hand on her conspicuously bare shoulder.

Looking down, she sees that she's wearing that puffy white monstrosity and she tugs at her skirt in fear. Hadn't she just been wearing winter gear? And where has her bag gone—she needed that.

"What's going on?" she asks, voice shaking.

_There's light above her, glittering and shifting like a kaleidoscope through the waves and ripples of the water, but it is light. Sarah kicks herself towards it, feeling the burning ache in her lungs that means she's been holding her breath for far too long._

"Oh, poor thing," the frizzy-haired woman clucks. Sarah avoids looking at her face and focuses on her heavy silver and green brocade dress instead, trying to keep the designs from blurring in her vision. She crouches over so that she is facing the ground, still covered in snow but now badly trampled.

Somebody else moves behind her and places a hand on the small of her back, keeping her steady.

"I don't know what's going on," Sarah cries. "I'm not going crazy, am I?"

"No, no of course not. You're simply… dreaming is the best word right now, I think," says the woman behind her. Sarah doesn't look up to see who it is, but it sounds like the woman with the long brown hair.

"Look up at me, Sarah," says somebody else with a bright blue skirt. Sarah does and finds herself looking back at the woman with black hair.

"You're not crazy," she tells the shaking champion firmly. "You never have been and never will be."

"Okay," Sarah replies weakly, even though the assurances don't really make her feel any better. Still, she keeps her gaze trained firmly on the ground. It's not that she doesn't want to see them—or maybe it is, she hasn't decided yet—but the fact that she's been wandering around in another world for a few days has just caught up to her, and so has the fact that she's lost her guide. That, or Grod has simply abandoned her.

She doesn't like looking at her white dress, either; it makes her think of Toby, and thinking of Toby makes her wonder how close she is to the center, and how long she's been here, talking to these cryptic women that were once runners.

_Underwater, she coughs, her lungs screaming for oxygen. It's becoming far too cold to properly move her limbs and she's not sure if she'll reach the glittering top or not._

"…Do you promise?" she asks hollowly, staggering from another one of her mini visions. "That I'm not crazy, I mean. Do you promise?"

And all at once, they answered "yes."

Sarah sighs, stands up, and smoothes the bodice of her dress out using her hands.

"Thank you, then."

And she looks out into the crowd.

Right into a pair of mismatched eyes.

Her breath hitches, and she turns around to run back through the trees, but somebody grabs her wrist before she can move away.

_Fighting the urge to give up, she moves her arm and drags herself up through the water._

"Don't look up," the woman in the bright blue dress warns her.

"Why? Afraid I'll see your king again?" she snarls, spitting more venom than she ever meant to.

"Once you do, you'll leave," warned the tall woman. Her skin had taken on a pale, nervous shade that made the jade color of her dress stand out.

"But I _want_ to leave!"

"You won't be able to come back human girl."

"I don't _want_ to come back!" Sarah sputters, tearing her wrist out of the one woman's grip.

"Oh, but you don't want to _leave_, nobody knows what's out there!" The woman with the cane says with a shudder.

"Awful risk, you know," says the woman with the frizzy hair, adding a click of her tongue.

"I don't _care!_"

And then Sarah flees, bobbing through the crowd, trying to push through to hopefully get to the other side; at least that way she can tall herself that she made some sort of progress.

Somebody spills a glass of wine on her, staining her white satin sleeve a pale pink color, and another person—what looked to be a male fey—offers his hand out to her, presumably to dance.

"No, no, I'm busy," Sarah cries over her shoulder as she pushes past.

The crowd is unbending, refusing to let her pass through so that she actually has to push people a bit out of her way sometimes. They cry out indignantly, and some turn and try to grab her and impede her progress.

Sarah's heart beats wildly and she can't help but to be reminded of the dream ballroom and the inhabitants—Revelers—within. They'd done the same thing, only a lot more gently. Sarah's massive sleeve has already been torn by somebody's gripping hand and it lets in the cold she hasn't been feeling too badly until now.

She coughs once and water spills out of her mouth. Only a few meters ahead of her, the Goblin King morphs out of the crowd long enough to smirk at her.

_There, just above her is the surface. Weak, and shaking, she reaches for it, can feel her fingertips breach that water—_

And then she's out, breathing air, soaking wet and freezing cold. There's nothing on the shore she's trying to swim to, no reassuring Grod, not even a single stinking _fuath_. Her pack in heavy on her back, waterlogged and icing over, just like her clothes and hair will start do to as soon as she has time to stop moving.

Sarah is shaking too badly to make her efforts at swimming terribly successful and she almost slips under again.

But soon enough she can touch the bottom, and she wobbles out of the water and collapses on the snowy shore, shivering violently from cold and fear.

_Did I just almost drown_? Her frantic mind can't come up with an answer but she's afraid that it is yes.

Curled up in the fetal position, Sarah coughs up water that she must have swallowed or breathed in. Tears stream down her face and are on their way to freezing before she can even think of trying to wipe them away.

From behind, she can hear the pond bubbling and with considerable effort, she turns around. The boot she lost floats innocently to the surface and bobs over to where she is.

She snatches it from the water and shoves it back on her foot, curling in on herself in a vain attempt to retain what little heat she has.

Thinking better of sitting around, she slowly stands and looks around, blinking freezing water away from her eyes.

"Well, come on, feet," she manages to say through chattering teeth, trying to muster the energy to move.

It's hard work to walk and she stumbles more than anything. It feels like it takes her ages to go only a few steps. Sarah manages to make it through to the trees and, seeing the cluster of boulders and rocks that actually looks to be easier to walk on than the snow, she moves towards it.

From between two boulders she can see a trail of steam. She puts her hand over it and pain arcs through her arm, but it's _warm_, and she is not, and she knows that if she allows herself to stay so cold and wet, she'll get sick at best.

She clambers over the boulder and finds an opening into what she assumes is a subterranean cave. It is very _warm_, and Sarah sighs in contentment as she walks forward, hand pressed up against the wall.

"_Sssssummer Queen_," something hisses from in front of her. "How long I have waited for you."

**A/N**  
>I didn't forget about updating, promise!<p>

And I _didn't_ forget about Jareth, he's still here! Next chapter is pretty Jareth-heavy, too, much more than this one.


	11. Fire

"I'm not the Summer Queen," Sarah tells the darkness ahead of her. The little cave is becoming almost unbearably hot and her half-frozen hair is now dripping all over the leaf-littered floor. It smells of leaf rot and mold and she tries to keep her mouth closed when she breathes. She can't see properly through the dark, but she thinks that there is something moving from the back of the cave. She hears something like a sigh and another blast of hot air hits her.

"I never have been," she tells this thing in front of her to continue talking, still squinting into the gloom in the back of the cave.

"Do not presume to tell me something, girl. I am older than you currently are in the form and I evidently know far more than you do." Whatever it is, it hisses some letters out as if its voice was not fit for human speech.

"Okay," Sarah breathes out, trying to placate whatever is speaking. "I won't. Can you tell me who she is, though? Nobody is explaining anything to me, _nobody_." She stands where she is, clenching her fists and curling her toes in her slowly drying boots. It is a long time before the creature answers, let alone _breathes_. Relief floods through her when she hears it sigh again; she thought it had managed to somehow drop dead while it was formulating an answer.

There is the sound of rustling leaves from the back of the cave and Sarah can see that whatever it is, it's moving again, but this time it's moving towards her. Slowly, it comes into the dim light of the cave mouth.

Whatever it is, it looks like some sort of giant, slimy, deformed lizard. It has a flat head and wide eyes set far apart, with strange red and gold markings around its eyes and trailing down its back. Little, bent legs end in little stubbed toes and there are weird appendages that look like fins at the edge of its head where Sarah would have placed ears, and around where she would have defined shoulder blades. They're at the end of the tail that swings lazily back and forth too.

She had half been expecting a dragon, but this was no dragon she would have ever thought of.

"The Summer Queen was lost, very long ago, even by _my_ standards," it tells her mournfully. "And with her, the summer."

"But you can't lose _summer_," protests Sarah, frowning at the thing's word choice. He made it sound as if the summer had simply been misplaced; sat down somewhere and forgotten. "It's a whole season—without it, the earth would… I don't know. Wither. Winter wouldn't end, nothing would grow…"

"And those depending on it would die," the creature continued for her, nodding in its strange way. "And I have needed it ever so badly, Queenling."

Sarah remains silent and the creature shuffles forward. While it speaks, she thinks that she can catch a glimpse of fangs.

"And magic is much like the seasons. Once it is out of balance, it will fade. The summer—heat, vitality, the very breath that keeps the earth alive—disappeared once day, many, many years ago, taken by the queen entrusted with it."

"I'm sorry about that, but—"

"And the world was thrown out of balance. Winter took over, as it is wont to do. Though its king fought its progress, it was not enough—without his queen, he was not strong enough."

"But what does that have to do with me?" She continues, inclining her head slightly to let the beast know that she had listened to its words.

"_You_ have that magic. I can smell it on you," the creature tells her, slithering forward while Sarah tries to stand her ground. It looks her up and down, visibly confused. "But you still look so _human_."

"That's because I am human," she tells it as if boasting. "Completely human. One hundred percent human, in fact."

If the beast could frown, it certainly would be doing so, Sarah thinks.

"But you're _not_," it whines. "You've gone too far, you've been here too long. You've _promised_ too much, already."

"I've only been here…" Sarah frowns and thinks, "two and a half days. I don't think I've gotten far. And I haven't promised anybody _anything_." She only realizes that her last statement is a lie after it leaves her lips, but that promise to Grod has not brought her _too_ much harm. After all, she escaped the _fuaths_ and the Revel, though she had lost the little goblin she was sure she'd find him again eventually.

She hopes that the creature staring at her with lyard brown eyes can't tell if she is lying or not, like some sort of living lie detector because she doesn't want to know what its reaction will be if it can. It was only a little lie, a small white one because she had forgotten about that itsy bitsy little promise herself, and so much had happened since then that it wasn't exactly at the front of her mind.

"You know so little," it spits out at her, eyes narrowing, pinning her in her spot in the cave surer than any physical binds would have. Sarah frowns, disgruntled with everybody's apparent disgust for her.

"Maybe if somebody would finally _explain_ something to me _for once_, I wouldn't know so little!" She snaps, voice raising as she goes. "And instead of snarling at me, _maybe_ you could help me out instead of going on and on about this stupid queen of yours!"

It stares at her, seeming to be stuck somewhere between shock, amusement, and anger. Somewhere inside, her stomach drops as she hears her own words.

"The heat—the _life_—of the labyrinth has returned since you have been here, little queen," it says slowly.

She bites her lips to keep herself from correcting the beast.

"Why are you here?"

"I'm here to save my brother," she answers immediately, glad to be able to speak. "And the rest of the children that the Goblin King has taken."

The beast chuckles. "You call him Goblin King? Never mind that," it amends when it sees her opening her mouth to reply. "Tell me, what will you do once you reclaim these children?"

"I'll go back to my home, where things make sense most of the time," she tells him confidently.

"And that," rumbles the monster, "is what I cannot allow."

Before she can step away, or so much as breathe, the not-dragon slithers forward, gnashing its many sharp teeth and hissing. What looks like sparks jump off of its back from the red and gold markings.

"What do you—"

It lunges at her and she leaps to the side—the beast's head crashes into the wall and she does her best to sprint out of the cave, but heavy, still soaking boots and winter clothing slows her down.

She can feel the heat emanating from the beast's skin just behind her and sparks land on the stone and snow all around her. They sizzle as they land, sending tiny jets of steam up into the air.

Sarah shouts for help, not truly believing that anybody would be around to hear her, and resigning herself to the fact that if she did not get away _quickly_, she'd most likely reduced to cinders.

Darting behind one of the many boulder scattered around—now she thinks that maybe the beast itself has done it, because they're all more than a little charred—she hopes that maybe, just maybe, the cold will eventually become too much for it and it would go back to its toasty abode.

She can hear it moving around to the left of her and she peeks around the boulder as quickly as she can. Seeing that it is looking for her among a pile of downed branches, she crawls over to a new hiding place, trying to be as silent as possible. Her breathing seems harsh to her in the cold air and aside from the angry noises that the creature makes while it is looking for her, the forest is silent.

Internally, she curses herself. She should have taken that as her first clue that _something_ had been wrong, and her second clue would have been the conspicuously smoking boulders. Even though she had been freezing, she should have at least _tried _to look for another means of safety.

What sounds like a tree splinters in half behind her, and then, seconds later, there is an accompanying roar of fire. Paling, Sarah tries to curl around herself even tighter.

_Is it setting the whole forest on fire?_ She thinks, beginning to panic. How was it even possible—the whole area, from what she could see, was saturated with snow. The flames now reach the very edge of her vision, the shadows that dance on the too cold tree trunks herald the flames that find them moments later. Smoke blows her way, and Sarah makes the mistake of coughing.

The frantic fumbling of the beast stop abruptly and she can hear it turning on the rocks littering the cave entrance. She can hear every step it takes, squat little toes shifting the stones around.

"Help," she whispers into the empty air.

There is another crack that splits the now-blazing air and Sarah assumes that it is the beast knocking over another tree. She tries to hold her breath as she edges away. If the smoke were thicker, more prominent in the area, maybe she could have escaped through it; as it is now, it's barely more than a campfire would have put off, and it was nothing more than an inconvenience for her.

The quasi dragon growls behind her and she can feel the reverberations through her body but she can't hear it moving anymore.

"You will not," something else growls, and she _knows _those tones, they way that voice rises and falls, the strange accent. Her eyes are as wide as saucers and she pulls her hands, now fisted up to her face to cover them.

The beast growls again, louder and she shudders.

"She is not yours to keep, salamander," the Goblin King warns, and Sarah now knows that to call her pursuer. She knew it wasn't a dragon, but… _Salamander?_

"I am hers, and she has abandoned me. I will exact my price," the salamander hisses, and she can hear it at least try to take a step forward, but it is stopped.

And by the sound of the crack, it was a rather forceful stop.

"She is more than just yours," the king warns. "Now go back to your cave, your flames." Sarah half expects him to offer the salamander's dreams to it but he does not.

Instead, he says, "Leave her to me, beast of fire."

Sarah frowns. While she didn't really want to be eaten by the salamander, she certainly did not like what the Goblin King had just said.

There is quiet, and then the giant salamander waddles off back to its cave. The Goblin King, from what she can tell from her position hunched behind the boulder, remains stationary.

"You may come out now, Sarah. The danger has passed." He sounds weary, but Sarah does not trust his words. As far as she is concerned, he _is_ the danger.

But she moves anyway—albeit very slowly—from behind the boulder so that she is soon standing next to it.

"Where have you misplaced your guide?" he asks, and Sarah gets the distinct impression that she is being teased.

"He got separated from me. I did not misplace him," she tells the Goblin King testily, remaining solidly beside the boulder. Her hair, only half dried but still freezing, drips a halfhearted drop of water onto her boots.

"Come now, you must be freezing."

Sarah does not move.

Frowning, the Goblin King removes his cloak—the feathery one that she had last seen him in the _first_ time—and holds it out for her, but makes it abundantly clear that she will have to traverse the distance between them herself if she wants it.

"What's going on?" She asks, hesitantly taking a step forward. "What was with that Revel—you were there—and this salamander?"

It's not as if she is expecting to get an answer anyway, which is why she asks her questions.

"That salamander is simply a victim of lost magic. She is a creature of summer, and with only me in this kingdom, she is suffering. I rather imagine that she had either wished to keep you in her cave, or eat you in hopes of getting to your magic."

Surprised, Sarah blinks.

"You actually answered a question," she tells him, neglecting to point out that he said she had magic.

He remains stoic and she doesn't notice as he edges ever so slightly closer.

Eventually, she grows tired of shivering and gives in, reaching out and stepping forward to take the cloak from his hands. She even mumbles a thanks and she wraps it around herself.

The once-burning branches now smolder and smoke; the flames have all been put out.

"You have used up three of your days, Sarah, and you still have much distance to travel. Leave this place and then rest for the night. Your guide should find you again."

And then he is gone, showering her with the magical residue she had seen all over the place during her first trek through the labyrinth.

* * *

><p><em>She is in his arms because he has finally managed to catch her. It has been quite a chase, of course—she flitted behind the masked dancers and teased him as much as he had teased her the first time. Appearing and the gone when somebody happened to pass between them, staring at him from one end of the room, waiting for him to get close, and then she would dance away, caught in the arms of another dancer. Once she caressed his shoulder, but when he turned she was already long gone.<em>

_She knows how to play, this Sarah. She might be in a place of his creation, bound by his rules, but she certainly knows how to bend them to her own will. _

_The pillars, for example. _

_More than once she had ducked behind one, and it seemed that the more she did that, more sprung up out of nowhere. And the dancers too; they helped to hide her, this time. Instead of tugging on her decidedly sultry green dress like they had on the white, they parted as a crowd to let her through. This time, it was he, Jareth that they hindered and laughed at and pointed in the wrong direction._

_He stalked her for hours in this dream, and as each hour ticked by he got increasingly anxious. Their time would be up—again—and she would be gone—again. _

_The look of surprise on her face when he stroked the hand that she had pressed up against the stark white wall was something to revel in, and the smile she flashed him after that—more of a smirk, really—sent chills down his spine. It was familiar, but not in a good way, because he knew that he made the same facial expression. It just was not natural on Sarah._

_But there she was, spinning and smirking in his arms, in the dress he wanted this time, with her hair loose and curled, the way he liked, a good portion of it resting gently on her rather exposed décolletage, which he appreciated. _

_The other couples surround them, pushing them closer during some movements of the song and almost tearing them apart at others. He clutches at her waist and hand in an almost desperate fashion, and every now and then she squeezes his hand or shoulder in something that was akin to reassurance._

"_Sarah…"_

"_Jareth?" She purrs, resting her head on his shoulder. "What is it?"_

"_Will you stay with me, this time?"_

_Sarah grins at him and pushes his arms away from her ever so lightly so that she can slip out of his grasp._

"_Oh, Jareth…" She sighs, but she does not sound sad. "I don't know why you even bother to ask." She twirls out of his grasp but did not go any further; instead she chooses to mock him by taking a step back every time he takes a step forward to her._

"_Stop running away." He orders._

"_Stop chasing me." She demands. _

"_I can't." He breathes, so soft that she can barely hear him._

_She frowns and looks down at her feet. "And I can't stop running. You can't fault me; I ran your labyrinth, after all. It's sort of what I do."_

_She fails to elude him for one moment, but it is all that he needs. He grabs her hand and pulls her to him again, trapping her around her waist with his other arm. She does not resist when he lets her hand drop and cups the right side of her face with his hand, and she does not resist when he claims her lips with his. She smiles into the kiss, but again, the displayed emotion does not match her body language, what she really feels._

"_Jareth." She gasps when he stops to take a breath. "Do you know what you're doing to yourself?"_

_He ignores her and backs her into a wall, rubbing the small of her back with his thumb. She leans into him and buries her face into the crook of his neck, sighing with pleasure. Jareth shrugs her off and captures her in another kiss that she does not fight, and instead falls in to. _

_The king traces the girl's collarbone with a gloved finger and then dips down to outline the neckline of her dress. When he gets dangerously low, she giggles in a way that he knoes Sarah never would._

_Jareth does his best to ignore it._

"_Do you know what you're doing to yourself?" She asks again, but this time in between shallow pants and gasps for air._

"_I do." He murmurs into her mouth again, but she pushes him away before he can kiss her. She steps away from the wall and pulls him along with her into another dance. They move around the other masked revelers in slow circles. _

_The king pulls their dance away from a couple that was wrapped in the same embrace that they had just been in._

"_You can't keep doing this forever." She whispers to him, lips swollen and red._

_They step around another lascivious couple and she pulls a little away from him so that their eyes meet._

"_I think you know that."_

_Three more steps and her mouth is as close to his ear as she can bring it._

"_She won't accept you. She hasn't before. She left for a reason," she says with a small, mocking smile that he can feel, and the spell was broken._

"_I think you know that, too."_

He wakes from his dream cold and shaking.

**A/N**  
>So, uh, guess which part <em>I<em> wrote with my eyes closed! I'm also going to ask if I need to increase the rating or something, what do you think?  
>Seriously though if there are typos in that section let me know because I wasn't kidding about my eyes being closed.<p> 


	12. In Illness

Had Sarah known about Jareth's dream, she might not have made a few of the choices she is making now. She might not have clutched so desperately to the cloak he gave her. She might not have breathed in his scent so deeply, though she tells herself that is simply because walking in a forest is _hard work_ and she needs to. She might not have, upon meeting a fork in her path, taken the left fork.

But she does, and after remembering where taking the _right_ path during her first run had gotten her, she thinks that a change of pace might suit her just fine. Besides, this side looks sunnier and easier to walk over. There aren't roots spilling out onto the barely perceptible path, waiting to trip her or turn her ankle. A few birds are even in the branches, singing songs she has never heard before.

There is still no sign of Grod when she curls up at the base of a tree for the night. Sarah misses his warmth, but only pulls the feathered cloak around her tighter. Her sleep is dreamless, uninterrupted.

Sarah wastes a day.

When she next opens her eyes, the sun is high in the sky and bright in her eyes. She almost expects to be frozen to the ground, but the cloak curls pleasantly around her shoulders has kept her warm through the night. Sarah clutches it to her and stands, grimacing at the way her legs and back protest the movement. She sneezes a few times and then coughs a few more; she hopes it's just a little bit of a cold coming on, but knows that the freezing water hadn't helped anything.

She tries to work out the knots in her muscles but soon gives up as the cold only seeps deeper into her bones. Not for the first time, she wonders where Grod is and if he's okay; she hasn't seen him since the run in with the _fuaths_ and she almost drowned in the pond that they guarded. Sarah wonders if she should try to find him; after all, she hasn't used up _that _much of her time, and the last time she had been to the kingdom, it hadn't seemed that large.

The only problem with her well-intentioned idea was that she did not truly know where she was or where she was going but she thought that moving would be better than staying in one spot, especially since she has misplaced her guide.

Sarah grimaces and collects her bag from the ground, straightening her coat and cloak out, trying to keep what warmth she had close to her. She wishes that she could change somewhere, but she originally expected this new run of the labyrinth to last as long as it had before, and hadn't really brought a change of clothes.

Moving is still slow and slightly painful for Sarah, but she stumbles along, fighting tree branches and roots as she goes. Forests used to be one of her favorite natural things, but now she had ceased to imagine them as romantic and is starting to realize that they are a bit of a pain when one has a time limit, a goal in mind, and everything from the weather to the inhabitants against her.

In fact, she's waiting for another roadblock to make itself known and dreads every snap of a twig or patch of snow falling from a branch. There aren't any animal noises, which she is both happy and upset about. She is happy because she doesn't have to worry about them; she is upset because ever since she was small, she was told that an area devoid of life was not a safe area to be in. This is an area like that, with only giant trees witnessing her passing through.

She's afraid that she is walking in circles. It _feels_ like she's walking in circles—nothing has changed in the way the trees, or undergrowth, or even the rocks look. Sarah wishes that she has a friend with her now to talk or walk with her, to keep her on the right path. It wasn't until now that she realizes how much she had depended on Ludo and Hoggle and Didymus, and even Grod, as bossy as he was. Sarah wonders where her old friends are, and why they have not come to save her. Did they even know she was even in the kingdom? If so, do they not know where she is? If not, why not?

Her sigh is the loudest noise around her.

But, the thought strikes her, what is they are not _able_ to come to her aid? Or worse yet, her friends—she gulps—her friends could have been punished for helping her the first time, could have felt the Goblin King's wrath, and were wary to help her a second time. And Grod… well, the poor little goblin had been thrown into the freezing water too, hadn't he? At best, they had merely been separated, and Sarah consoled herself with thoughts of how capable he was—certainly more so than she would ever be. He wouldn't have been sent to be her guide if not.

Unless that was the plan to begin with—to get her hopelessly lost and confused so that she would lose. Maybe the Goblin King was still bitter about his previous defeat, but…

She bites her lip, deep in thought, trying to untangle herself from her internal web of thoughts.

If he had wished for her to lose, wouldn't he have let her become a salamander snack? Frustrated, she turns and kicks a nearby tree trunk. Her only reward (and it in fact is more of a punishment) is a patch of snow falling on her head. Now leaning more towards furious than frustrated, she shakes the wet snow from her head.

"This is so _stupid!_" she shrieks. "If he weren't such a glittering sore loser then—"

But her own thoughts stop her words and she switches tracks.

"And I have to be stuck out in this frozen wasteland, with snow all around—" Sarah stops again and blinks, tearing off one of her mittens a second later to scoop up a handful of the offending snow.

It's not even frozen, not really. In fact, the snow is even a bit wet, as if the sun had been on it for a while, melting it.

She looks up to the sky—not that she can see it too well; the tree branches, though bare, block her view. It couldn't have been the sun, not with those branches.

Maybe it was just warming up overall, maybe the seasons were changing—after all, Sarah doesn't know what the seasons were like in the Underground (and she calmly ignores the reasonable part of her that says even if it _was_ the changing of the weather, it wouldn't change so _suddenly_.)

She voices the first thought aloud to make it more solid and knows it's not the truth, knows that maybe she should start paying more attention to what people were saying about the Summer Queen and the Winter King.

Perhaps she could get to the bottom of it, figure out why everybody kept insisting she was this queen—her, boring, _human_ Sarah Williams, born to _human_ parents, raised in a thoroughly _human_ world. So she couldn't possibly be this Fey queen. She didn't even have to voice that thought out loud to her how weak her conviction was.

But here is what confuses her: the Winter and Summer monarchs were supposed to be counterpoints, soulmates—no, that wasn't quite right, bound even tighter than soulmates—and yet the Goblin King had treated her abominably. Sure, she'd never dated before—not really, because Sarah is pretty certain that one hour in third grade because of a dare doesn't count—but she is pretty sure that kidnapping and then murdering somebody's sibling and then kidnapping a score of other children, including their cousin, is not a good way to go about getting somebody's attention. Neither is forcing them to run a crazed labyrinth (twice), throwing a snake in their face, sending spinning blades at them, or terrorizing them in general.

Chocolates would have been a nice start, or flowers.

Sarah would also have greatly appreciated not being stalked and taunted or deliberately scared. If the Goblin King had felt something for her, he wouldn't have been so cruel.

And _her_ only feeling towards the King were confusion and anger, with fear coming in a close third, all of which she thought reasonable.

Another patch of melting snow dropped down onto her head and she glared up at the sky.

"That isn't funny," she declares, speaking to nobody or thing in particular, brushing the half melted snow from her hair. Nothing came as a reply; the wind didn't even rustle the branches above her.

"I'm getting very tired or this," she spoke to the empty air. "Everybody thinks I'm this… this queen. A Summer Queen. And I don't think that I _am_." Sarah punctuates her last sentence by kicking a good sized stone into the underbrush. It makes a dull thud as it collides with what must have been a tree trunk.

"And this queen is supposed to bring balance to the Underground, she's supposed to… I don't even know what she's supposed to do. On _top_ of that, nobody's giving me any _answers!_ If I just _knew_ something, I might be able to… I dunno, muddle through to an answer. But I _can't_!"

And she takes her frustrations out on another stone, kicking it again out of her way and into the underbrush, but this time, it crashes against other stones, and eventually makes a faint splashing noise. Hearing the sound of water down below reminds her of how much she'd thoroughly enjoy a hot bath.

The underbrush blocks her view and it's difficult to even get over to what Sarah assumes is a drop off. Mud clings to her boots as well as clumps of ice and wet snow, and she's a little worried that if she leans over too far, she'll slip over the edge.

Tumbling down the edge of a steep (though admittedly not that large) cliff does not seem like the perfect way to start the day's travels, so she backs up a little.

As she is doing so, she spots a curious thing through the branches—Sarah isn't sure, but it looks like a roof, or the corner of a roof of a small cottage. She looks for a way down, but can't spot one that doesn't look like it wouldn't end in broken bones. She frowns deeply. Grod hadn't mentioned other people living out here, but then again, he hadn't mentioned ponds that could transport a person to another pond.

And he certainly hadn't anticipated getting separated so suddenly… or at least she hopes he hadn't.

Maybe, if she continues going forward, there will be a little path down to the cottage where the inhabitant will take pity on her and give her someplace warm to stay for a little. And food. A nice bowl of hot soup would also be greatly appreciated.

Sarah coughs again, deeply and from her chest. And maybe, if she's really, really lucky, they could do something about the mild fever she's sure she's got.

With these hopes in mind she trudges forward through the heavy, melting snow, fantasizing about warm blankets and roaring firesides; for as quickly as the snow is melting, she still needs her heavy layers and her warm cloak.

The fact that the cloak was once the King's, she chooses to ignore. After all, he'd sort of given it to her, hadn't he? And she'd certainly earned it, with all that she'd been through, hadn't she?

And if it smelled like him, like cloves and ozone and snow, well, who cared? She _liked_ cloves, and besides, it was maybe better that it didn't smell like her, not until she had a bath at any rate—or the Bog of Eternal Stench.

And if she held it tight, well that's just because—

Sarah stops. Considers the direction her thoughts are leading her in and frowns in a detached way, because she can't figure out why, for the life of her, she's thinking them.

It scares her and she shudders a little, feeling betrayed by her own mind.

But her thoughts are quickly overtaken by the sound of trickling water growing louder and the fact that the ground has taken on a decidedly downward tilt, and that she _thinks_ she can see a wall of the cottage peeking out through the trees every now and then.

Sarah grins foolishly and runs as quickly as she can (which isn't very quickly at all) towards her goal of warmth and food.

But the run, as pathetic and ungainly as it is, exhausts her. She's gone maybe one or two meters before she is panting and doubled over with coughing, unable to go any farther. And when she looks up, she's lost sight of the cabin.

Panic starts to set in and she stumbles forward a few more feet, thinking now that possibly it had been an illusion all along. The sound of running water has intensified, but no matter where she looks, she cannot find the shelter she had been searching for.

One step does not change her surroundings.

Another sends her into a snowdrift and she can't avoid. Sarah crashes into it and lays motionless, feeling her ankle throb.

All of those hiking trips with her dad and stepmom as a kid flash through her mind, _flick-flick-flick_, because her dad had once upon a time fancied himself a survivalist and had drilled a few rules into her head, should she ever get lost in the wilderness.

Stay warm was top of the list, and she almost laughed.

Find food, find shelter, and _do not get injured_.

But here she was, coughing up her lungs and sitting in a melting snow bank with twinges of pain shooting through her ankle. She couldn't even stand up, but not for lack of trying—every time she tried, her ankle felt like it was going to break in half.

And one string of thoughts chased themselves around in her mind.

She was doomed. The kids were doomed. They were _all_ doomed.

Hot tears pricked at the corner of her eyes and she rolled herself upwards so she could get a good bearing on where she was.

Perhaps if she rested her foot for a few minutes, it would feel better, and then continued.

Sarah closes her eyes and begins counting the seconds; after two minutes she gives up. A few minutes turn into an hour, and an hour turns into three.

By the fourth hour she is lightly dozing, having exhausted herself earlier.

And at the fifth hour, a spell is cast.

**A/N**  
>Real life got in the way a few (thousand) times, and as I'm sure you've seen before as an excuse for a long absence, my laptop took a dive and I lost <em>everything<em>.

But here's this.


	13. Rosemary

There's an owl in the tree above her.

It has huge black eyes that shine in the light off the snow that _should_ render it blind, and tawny and gold feathers that it readjusts occasionally. The owl's talons grip the tree branch and it snaps at the singly fly that dares to fly too closely.

Sarah doesn't know this.

Sarah is curled up in the snow, sweating despite the cold. One of her mittens has slid off her hand (she hadn't properly put it back on) and the exposed skin is red from the chill.

There's an owl in the tree above her, but Sarah doesn't know this. It has sat and watched her for the past five and a half hours and wished that she wouldn't fall asleep in the snow.

But the owl knows that its wishes will go unanswered, like they have forever, particularly in regards to the sleeping girl below. But her wishes… That was another matter entirely.

Her brother had been taken, as per her wish. She was the heroine, the king the villain, as was her wish.

She had led the glorious rescue and _won_, kicking down an entire kingdom in the process, as was her wish.

But before then, too, before the little barely- human in the snow had even drawn her first breath.

She had desired to travel, to explore, to _know_ the other side. To leave him behind, though she didn't know it at the time.

And so she had.

These were dangerous thoughts, and the owl would not think them.

Instead, he flaps his powerful wings and with a single weary sigh, the girl settles deeper into her sleep.

She does not wake as the owl above her (which she does not know is there) takes off from its perch. She does not wake as the snow crunches beside her under the weight of a heavy leather boot.

She _does_ mumble something incomprehensible when a gloved hand slides underneath her shoulders and knees, and she winces in her sleep as her injured ankle is jostled the slightest bit.

The Goblin King is careful to walk slowly with his precious queenling, lest she somehow wake though the spell or another treacherous snowdrift presented itself or—

Sarah sighs _(again)_ and curls deeper into his arms, crushing herself against warm leather and fabric and _skin_.

He resists his own sigh and tries to shift her away, though that only manages, rather predictably, to shift her slightly closer.

Her now mittenless hand, the one that been resting between her stomach and his chest, latches onto a length of his low- hanging hair and with it, the pendant hanging around his neck. Her cool fingers brush against his bare chest.

He almost drops her.

If only he had been able to eventually forget her, like he could all the other challengers, all the other girls, all the other Wishers. But she wasn't—_isn't_. She has managed to lodge herself firmly within him, with nothing more than a few well-chosen words and a wish. She stormed into his life (after storming out) and made him act the role of the antagonist, even when he really would rather not. And he should hate her, he keeps reminding himself. He really should.

But he can't, because she is her, she is _Sarah_, and she is, she is…

The fearsome Goblin King looks down at his sleeping burden. Sarah is frowning lightly in her sleep, but not deeply, and her dark hair has fallen into her face, obscuring everything else. When she breathes, it moves gently.

He has to remind himself again that he shouldn't be this fond of her, but there is only one problem: he is.

As he watches, sweat breaks out on Sarah's forehead and he knows enough about what she's been through in the past few days and illnesses to know that he should probably get her to the cottage and its caretaker and _soon_. Even her breath is cold against his chest and she is human enough that he can still feel the sickness taking hold. And she is still just human enough that if it was something serious—and it went unchecked—that there could be serious consequences.

And finding her again was simply not something he could do. He couldn't wait all those years, again, couldn't suffer through any more Wishers, and there was the gnawing fear that if she was gone _again_, if he missed her, _again_, that she might not ever come back. She might never remember.

His jaw clenches and he clutches her closer, attempting to pick up his speed, which is not as easy a task as one might have thought it would be. Sarah is dead weight in his arms and the snow, although it had indeed begun to melt, there was still an abominable amount of it.

What was worse: he wasn't exactly sure how far away the cottage was.

Or if the caretaker would let him in.

Or if the caretaker would let _her_ in, for that matter, or if taking here there was breaking some sort of rule or not. He'd never really paid much attention to what was _allowed_ and what was not.

It probably wasn't, but he had never really been one for following rules—neither had she, which is what would make this whole encounter rather tricky. It made her unpredictable, doubly more so that he couldn't be sure where Sarah was, or what she knew, or if she even remembered anything.

Perhaps the cottage, if she were allowed in, would take care of some of that. But then again…

He presses his lips together, mentally shutting out the thought. Sarah is still sleeping deeply in his arms, but her frown has grown deeper. Briefly, the Goblin King wonders if the spell isn't quite agreeing with her.

The cottage should be just up ahead here, after this bend in the path and the old, old oak that had stood sentry for her for so long, back even when it still had leaves.

But there was no longer any easily discernible path and the oak might well have been felled long ago. How long has it been since he has been here? He had tried his best to ignore the place, to forget that it existed—the temptation to bring back what was lost would have been too great, one that he was not certain he could keep from. The books had to work their own magic, in their own time.

Unfortunately, he had succeeded. The cottage has been long unused and he has forgotten what even the interior looks like, there are wards all around it so he can't magic himself there (much less Sarah), and Sarah is shivering cold in his arms and—

An oak looms up ahead.

He breathes a sigh of relief. The cottage slowly appears through a tangle of old, leafless branches; the windows glow with warm firelight and tendrils of smoke lazily waft out of the chimney. Behind her curtain of hair, Sarah smiles gently.

She sighs, too, but the king does not hear. Somewhere in her, Sarah knows this place, and this place knows Sarah, the sort of human girl whom has never set foot within its walls.

And as if in greeting, the front door opens wide. Heat emanates from the fireplace within and there is was smells to be hot, spiced cider on the table. A bed is dressed and covered with thick quilts in the back room, which he can see through the other open door.

The Goblin King had not expected this sort of greeting. He steps in carefully with Sarah, half expecting it to be a trap and for them to be ejected any second.

But it is not—nothing happens when he steps further in, and nothing happens when he places her on the bed after disentangling her hand from around his amulet. Almost as a second thought, he covers her with few of the many quilts. One of them, he remembers, she had made herself a very long time ago. Some of the stitching is unraveling.

In her sleep, Sarah curls into the warmth and away from the king who had carried her so far, pulling the unraveling quilt closer.

"How many times do I have to save you, dearest?"

Sarah does not respond.

Jareth sits at the edge of her bed, focusing on the side of her face that he can see. Carefully, trying very hard not to touch her skin, he brushes her hair away from her face.

"And how long will it be," he whispers lowly, leaning close to her ear, "until you reciprocate?"

Knowing that he will not get an answer, he stands and makes his way to the door.

"She's hurt her ankle," he tells the empty air, hand hovering over the handle to the outside door. He desperately wants to say something else but instead he orders "see to it."

And then he is gone, and does not hear the light laughter that follows his back.

* * *

><p><em>She has never known such terror.<em>

* * *

><p>The caretaker of the cottage does not truly have her own physical form, but that does not stop her from pulling Sarah out from under the pile of blankets and inspecting the girl's ankle.<p>

It's not a very bad sprain; it will heal. She finds bandages to wrap around the ankle and divests Sarah of her heavy outer gear.

* * *

><p><em>Her family has gotten the news only recently, though she supposes she has always known. Isn't that the way they had said it was with the new king, too?<em>

_But that does not help her now—not when her family is afraid to even make eye contact with her or her friends are afraid to speak to her. As if she were a different person from who she had been five days ago, before she accidentally exposed herself and before the Regents had descended upon her with all of their power._

_She wishes that they would all just forget, that they all would just treat her as they did before. As if she had never held heat within her hands, before she was the Summer Queen._

_But they do not, and within the week she is to be shipped off to the castle to meet the Winter King._

_Her counterpart._

_He has been living there by himself for a year; she has never met him before._

_And she is very, very scared._

* * *

><p>Sarah is tucked back into bed.<p>

The spell does not lift.

* * *

><p><em>He is not what she expected, and standing barefoot in silk finery, running a brush through her own hair, she suspects that she is not what <em>he_ expected either._

_After all, she is supposed to be wearing slippers, and she is supposed to let an attendant do her hair. _

_But the slippers don't quite fit her feet, and she has always brushed her own hair._

_And he—_he _is not supposed to be gaping at her so obviously and he should never have entered her rooms without knocking._

_He stands and stares for a few more seconds and then turns on his heel and leaves, cold air hangs in her doorway. She watches his retreating back, wondering when they will actually speak, or if she can get out of eating dinner with him tonight. Or even if she wants to get out of it._

_He is attractive enough, all gold and silver and tall, tall muscle, a contrast to her own… whatever she has, she doesn't really think of it, she has not looked properly in a mirror for a long, long time. But he is cold._

_And they are to be married in a month; she does not know his name._

_But that evening when she is summoned for dinner, she goes down to the hall. At first she thinks that he will not show up, that he has done what she almost did because she is alone in the large hall, sitting by herself._

_Just in case, she holds off eating for a few minutes, staring intently at the door. She is rewarded when the heavy wooden door flies open and he rushes in, looking as though he has just woken up._

_She smiles into her soup, looking away from him. He glances at her and makes his way to the other end of the table._

Sarah smiles in her sleep and her lips move to the words of a conversation spoken long, long ago.

_She stands in her blue gown and tries not to think of all the people assembled before her and the Winter King two paces to her left. _

_The vows are exchanged, the promise to protect, to cherish, to balance. They both make them, but when the clasp hands his are still ice cold and she is sure that she burns him just the slightest bit. Both of the new monarchs wear faint grimaces as the other Kings and Queens make their way up the dais to handfasten them._

* * *

><p>Sarah begins to awaken.<p>

"But I want to know more," she whispers.

The caretaker strokes her brow with warm hands and soothes her back into sleep.

* * *

><p><em>The garden is dying.<em>

_Winter is coming._

_It had been her last refuge, besides her cabin, but that was deep in the woods and would soon be engulfed in snow. A bird sings in the tree above her and she cups a rose in her hands, willing it back into health. The petals burn bright red for a moment, but when she removes her hands, they fade again._

_She should be used to this by now; her time is fading while his draws nearer, and her flowers die and animals move away. The sun fades from her skin day by day. Soon it will be gone, and she will get to rest for a few months while he takes over._

_It is a relief—and a little scary. While she does not have to worry about arranging or balancing quite as much, the cold seeps into her skin and the frost kills all of her favorite flowers. And she has to stand back as her world dies._

_Something crunches behind her—somebody has trod on one of the dead leaves that litter the stone path and she knows without looking that it is _him_. He has joined her in her garden, like he usually does. The petals of the dying roses curl in on each other just the slightest bit._

"_Out here again?"_

_She does not answer immediately, but she turns around to meet his greeting. He tucks one of the roses behind her ear; it is dead and she tries not to mind. He can't help it, she knows that, and he is only trying in his own way to be kind. The thorns, at least, have been plucked._

"_Yes," she eventually tells him, and does not will the rose to life again. It would hurt him like seeing the frost on their lawn hurts her._

_He sits down next to her and she is thankful the little bench is wooden._

"_Does it still hurt?" he asks, and gently cups her face in his hand, stroking her cheek with his thumb. She _wants_ to say no but closes her eyes and pulls away a little instead—she can't help it. His frost stings._

_He draws back and without looking she knows he is frowning._

"_Do I hurt you?" she asks, grabbing his hand and holding it between hers. He does not pull back and instead says "not so much right now."_

_They both know it is because she is falling out of power and he is rising. It will be the same in a few months' time, with her burning him._

_He stands to go and as he turns, the words "I love you," catch in her throat._

* * *

><p>Sarah is not used to crying, not actual crying. Play crying, acting, she is very familiar with. But the hot tears streaming down her face are not fake, however long ago they were shed. And this ache, burning and cold at the same time, sweet and bitter, she does not consciously recall ever having felt before.<p>

For now, it is better that she sleeps.

* * *

><p><em>The next time she sees him, he is wearing gloves.<em>

* * *

><p>And for a very, very long time, she does.<p>

* * *

><p><em>She cannot stand this any longer, this tension between them. One always hurts the other, there is no reprieve and no stopping it; it is something that they accept and try to live with.<em>

_But it is very difficult._

_Regents drop in unannounced, unwanted, to check up on them. She hates them, but is not sure why._

_And one day after she has burned him trying to kiss him, she tells him that she wishes it were different, would give it up or change it if she could. The Regent hears, and remembers—_

* * *

><p>Grod cannot find the cottage so easily; he is not one of the caretaker's trusted few, and it takes him a very long time to track Sarah' path up until that point.<p>

* * *

><p>—<em>and the next time he visits, seeks her out.<em>

_She is crying, but it is the beginning of winter and she spends a lot of her time crying._

"_There is a way to change all of this," he whispers into her ear, and she nods and begs him to tell her how_

_The Regent leads her to a part of the castle she does not think she has ever been to before. Its hallways twist and turn and the staircases are steep and crumbling and make no sense. She is dizzied by their paths._

_And there is one in particular that scares her; it is not lit properly and, as much as a staircase can, seems sinister, like a predator in wait._

"_Go up," the Regent urges, "if you go up, your problem will be solved."_

_She wants so desperately to believe, wants the Summer and Winter to be gone from she and her beloved that she trusts the scheming Regent._

_She ascends the stairs._

_And when she reaches the top and looks __**up**__, she is gone._

* * *

><p>Sarah wakes screaming.<p>

**A/N**  
>Not sure how frequently updates will happen; I sort of have to fit them around being a full time student at college and working two jobs.<p>

_BUT_, that being said, I won't abandon this fic. I really do love writing it, even if I have gone through all sorts of hell (my laptop crashed and I lost everything, which accounts for the year-long absence.)

Please please please tell me what you think.


	14. Revival

She can still feel the trails her tears have left behind on her face, thought they are now mostly dried. Her throat is sore. Her ankle aches. Her world feels like it's falling down. Suddenly, all in rushed bursts, she remembers little things.

Peach trees blooming in the courtyard garden, heat dancing under her skin as she tends happily to a lilac bush.

Her heart racing as she follows the king—her husband and counterpart—to the top room in the highest tower where they will watch the stars come out.

His heartbreak when his touch leaves her with frostbite. Her anguish when she leaves heat blisters on his arms, his lips, his cheek.

Crying alone in her room as the summer slips from her skin, thinking _he probably does the same at winter's end._

Smiling with him as he shows her a nest of fledgling starlings he's found on the balcony.

One winter, he tries to teach her how to skate. It doesn't go too well.

Nightmares of her burning him so badly he is unrecognizable, or hates her, or dies. Those are the nights she holds him tighter in bed while he strokes her hair.

And then—

Kind words. "Others have done it, before you. All the kings and queens have taken the stairs, at some point, you know. The two of you do not have to continue down this path, but instead can be reborn without the ice and the sun. Be together." So she takes the stairs—so, so many stairs that her legs ache—with the Regent close behind. The heavy wooden door at the top is open slightly and it towers above her.

"Go on," the Regent urges softly, pushing her forward slightly.

She hesitantly steps forward, slips her hand into the crack between door and frame. It feels like water; cool and smooth and she hauls the door open wider. Beyond is darkness.

Sarah-not-Sarah steps forward, past the frame, and into the darkness. Just as she turns back, the door slams shut. Her way back is gone. She fades.

And now Sarah knows much more than she ever thought she would, even if most of it doesn't make sense and makes her head hurt. She does not move from her place in the bed, but shifts into a sitting position so that her back is against the headboard. Heat brushes against her forehead, pulling her hair away from her eyes. A platter of food drops out of the air in front of her and Sarah barely manages to catch it in time. Some of the broth in the bowl sloshes out onto the blanket beside her.

"Thank you," Sarah croaks to the empty air in front of her. The broth is warm and the bread accompanying it smells freshly baked. Both are delicious, though she eats them slowly; they are some of the first food she's been able to properly eat in months, save the meal Banna gave her. The meeting with the half-fuath felt like it had probably happened ages ago, when it had probably happened just last week. The passage of time has become fuzzy. Her trip through the labyrinth to save Toby—the first time—felt years ago, yet her trip through the door at the top of the stairs felt as if it had happened maybe a week ago. In reality, it probably had occurred years ago, maybe decades. Sarah chews a piece of bread slowly, and thinks that maybe it had been several decades through the door. Probably more. Her heart still aches from it, now that she knows to remember.

She had been lied to by somebody she'd trusted, and things had… gone badly. Sarah thinks of the salamander, and the king… especially the king. Remembers the pain in his eyes, directed at her, and the anger, which might not have been. And she can feels things, other things at the edge of her senses, now that she knows to look for those too. The labyrinth—the entire land—is dying. The magic is stagnant. Parts of it had already dies, Sarah is certain of it.

And more is on its way.

The Bog grew another mile today. More of the inhabitants of the surrounding land crowd into his throne room to petition him for aid, though there is none to give. They threaten him with the Regents, telling him that if nothing is done soon, they will force him to abdicate. They whisper that the Queen has abandoned them, that she is not coming back, that she and her powers are dead, forever. A small part of him starts to believe them, but another part remembers Sarah and the promise that lives inside her.

But the Regents have already arrived and they don't care about Sarah or her promise. They care about the ice and the hunger and the death of the land and the magic which had once flowed through it. The infection had long since crept to other lands. He's surprised it even took so long. The Winter King stands up from his throne, stretches, and takes half a step forward, turning left between two shadows.

The heart of the labyrinth is coated thickly in ice. Sarah's rose bushes wait to bloom under layers of frost; he steps past them to a small orchard. The trees there, too, are covered in frost and snow. Half-formed peaches litter the ground, rotting. Some of the trees are missing branches or are split in half from the weight of the snow.

He sits in their shadows and silently mourns.

* * *

><p>Her ankle still throbs, and she suspects she's done something more to it than just give it a bad turn. Normally, she would have been worried about time limits and rescuing children and defeating Goblin Kings… And while she fate of the children still worries her, she turns her mind to weightier subjects like Summer Queens and Winter Kings and promises both kept and not and deep, bone-searing loss. She wonders how long it's been like this, and how much she doesn't remember.<p>

The caretaker appears regularly to bring her food and run baths for her; where is got the food, water, and soaps, Sarah does not know, but she accepts everything gratefully. Caretaker, which Sarah has taken to calling the entity, never let itself be seen by the girl, and Sarah suspects that it is incorporeal, but not a ghost.

It is not until maybe her third or fourth day there, when she tries to explore the cabin and her ankle gives out that she has a better idea of what Caretaker is. As she falls, trying to grasp the dusty wall to stop herself, she is lifted up and gently propelled to a nearby chair. Caretaker tended to her ankle while Sarah concentrates on trying to see whatever she could of it.

Eventually, Sarah comes to the conclusion that is just _is_—and the Summer Queen created it to look after the cabin… And maybe it held a small portion of the Queen's powers; just enough to keep the cabin warm and the Caretaker existing. Maybe just enough of the Queen's magic existed in this entity to have kept the land from total, instant ruin. And maybe, just maybe, it was time for her to take it back.

Sarah mulls over this thought and wonders if it could be considered taking a life.

When her mind wanders from Caretaker, it often slips to the King. She's still unsure which title best fits him—Goblin or Winter—and both are snagged firmly within her. She wonders now that she has more of the pieces to her puzzle, if he hates her, but needs her. Wonders if that's the only reason she's alive now, if her cousin and Toby and all the others really still are alive, safe and sound, and if she'll ever really get them back. She spends a lot of time worrying about things most likely out of her control.

But then her mind wanders back again to her King. Sometimes, he scares her… And for the most part, Sarah had tried to give as well as she'd gotten. More of the time when she thinks of him _before_, she knows she loved him. Could probably love him again, even. She wonders if he feels the same.

…Or even if he possibly could. Sarah chews on her lower lip and wonders if, magic aside, he would want her back like she sometimes wants him back—or could want him. To say that their relationship (or what could be, or even what _was_) is confusing would be an amazing understatement. It was currently tearing a world—if not just his kingdom, but something inside Sarah tells her the rot spread further—apart.

But the rot hadn't really begun with them, or if it had, it would have been something the monarchs could have dealt with together. No, the balance had been tripped by that corrupt Regent.

And now, the world was crumbling apart, right beneath her feet.

* * *

><p>Once, years after the Queen had vanished, Jareth himself had thought of ascending the stairs. They had been <em>meant<em> to cross them together, when the time came, when they were both old and weary and wanting to be renewed. To pass both the stairs and the door together was to pass on—but not forever. He is a King, and she a Queen, after all.

And they were meant to do it _together_. Always, together.

But Sarah had broken that, for whatever reason. She had gone on alone, without him, to meet whichever fate rose up to greet her. That had scared him.

Oh, they may die, and be reborn again, alone, as Sarah had been; that much he knows is at least possible. But there was not guarantee that they would have ever found each other again. The only reason he _had _found her was because of those infernal books. No promise that she would love him, nor he her. Through he would never admit it, the thought terrifies him; for them to be resigned to strangers passing on the street, to grow old with somebody else by his side, to ever dare love another. These are the whispered fears that wake him gasping in the dark on those few precious nights he can sleep.

Now that Sarah has returned, he has them more frequently. More of the dreams are born of the gnawing dread that she hates him, that she will never assume the throne. He is worried for his people, of course, and those of the other affected kingdoms. They currently face hardships previously unimagined, and have been for some time. Again and again he has been told this should be his primary concern.

But he is not completely selfless—far from it. He worries the most about Sarah. What will happen with Sarah. Wonders if, somehow, how that she's been dragged back kicking and screaming, some tiny part of her does not hate him. He knows it is a lot to ask for, and he is probably pushing his luck even hoping.

But, maybe, if she hadn't left because she hated him so completely, she will stay.

Even if only for a little while longer.

* * *

><p>A few days—possibly even more than a few—after her revelation, Sarah has another. It's a conclusion she should have made long ago, really, and it is simple.<p>

She will do what is in her power—which, admittedly, has increased significantly—to fix the Underground. And maybe, if she was feeling generous and he wasn't throwing snakes at her, a certain king of a certain labyrinth, though this is a decision she decides to put off until later.

Sarah accepts that, by some bizarre twist of fate, she might just be this Summer Queen. Somewhere, deep inside of her, maybe she had already known; waking up in the cabin had triggered some memories.

"Caretaker," she speaks aloud, feeling like a fool. "It isn't too late for summer to begin, is it?" She waits for an answer, knowing there is a good chance she will not get one. Caretaker has been becoming more and more dormant as of late; Sarah suspects that soon enough, she will recede into oblivion. Whether this is a good thing or not remains to be seen.

She wonders if, somehow, that will break whatever tenuous hold the previous Queen had over the land.

A flicker of warmth hovers near her shoulder.

"Thank you, caretaker," she whispers, mouth suddenly dry. "I was wondering if there might be… that is, do you…" Sarah licks her lips, suddenly nervous though she does not know why.

"Look, I don't know how to do any of this magic… or… Summer Queen stuff, and—this sounds stupid, but—do you have any, I don't know, quick tutorials on it or anything? Something to sort of jump start the learning process?"

Caretaker, in the vague heat form it had been forced to assume as of late wavers by her shoulder for a few more moments before disappearing completely. On the desk across the room, paper shuffles and clouds of dust fly into the air.

Her ankle still twinges in pain when she puts pressure on it but the trip to the desk is only a few paces. The chair she leans on as she crosses to the desk holds her weight, however old and rickety it looks.

Scrawled messily on the yellowed paper is a single word. At first it is difficult to make out; it was as if the author hasn't put pen to paper in such a long time they had almost forgotten how to form letters.

_Meditate,_ it says, and Sarah lets out a low groan.

"What, no fireballs or dragons or… or dangers untold? None of that?"

There is no reply.

Nevertheless, she lowers herself into the ancient chair and, for the first time in her life, tries to meditate.

Based on books and movies and television programs, she understands the basic premise; clear your mind of all thoughts and let nothing disturb you. This task proves, however, to be much easier said than done. The moment she sits down, thought race into her head—_what am I _doing_, I'm taking orders from a _ghost_, will this hurt, this is so _stupid_, what if I gain these powers, what if I _don't_ gain these powers_—and just as she tries to quell one, another rises. Her mind reaches back to Banna and lost Grod and the missing (kidnapped) children and leather gloves—she suppresses a frown at the last one—and the stupid book, stupid selfish wish.

At around the same moment she's rehashing why, exactly, she hasn't been friends with Jenny Benner since the third grade, she realizes that she needs to stop. She's only growing more and more frustrated.

Clearly, sitting calmly is not and probably never will be her greatest strength.

"_Fine_," Sara bites out, to nobody in particular. "I'll just think… warm thoughts." Her new resolve, which had started out so strong, peters out to a dull sigh.

"I," she breathes, "cannot do this."

But she tries anyway, thinking of warm brownies straight from the oven, or curling up with some kettle-hot tea and a good book (but grits her teeth when she realizes she's thinking of The Book,) and sunburns so bad it feels like the sun itself is trapped under her skin… Driveways to blisteringly hot they burn the bottoms of her feet and candles and bonfires and having ten or twelve thick blankets _and_ a fluffy Merlin, all piled on top of her. Her fingertips grow warm, but it may just be because she has her hands curled into little balls of concentration. She focuses on sweaters and being bundled up on a long car ride in the winter with the heat cranked up to full blast.

…And unbeknownst to her, the light frost at her windows slowly begins to melt.

* * *

><p>It's tough, being a goblin—even a shapeshifting goblin—when that goblin's duties are to protect and guide a fledgling queen through her counterpart's element… Especially when that Queen insists on being headstrong and willfully ignorant and clashing with the locals. And the King isn't too much better or much help, either.<p>

At least Grod hasn't been threatened with a bogging. Yet.

But dogs are good at tracking and Grod is sometimes a dog, a fact which he takes full advantage of. Soon enough he thinks he has her trail; she is, after all, the only part human who would be wandering through this area. He winces when he passes the salamander's cave, eyeing the charred rocks.

The trail there smells like magic, but not her magic, and he follows this further into the forest. Her footsteps are mostly gone but the broken twigs and scent and occasional owl feathers from a very distinctive cloak are not.

Grod has the sinking suspicion that she was lead towards the cabin and has his doubts as to whether or not he'll be able to find her. It is, after all, the place the Queen would retreat to when she didn't want to be found.

Unhappy about these prospects, the dog sized goblin plods on.

* * *

><p>He has to escape the regents.<p>

They've found more of his other hiding places by now—not… that he'd call them _hiding places_ of course. That was far too undignified and unbefitting of him as a king. No, he was engaging in evasive maneuvering from a cunning enemy. Totally appropriate for the situation at hand.

They have set an ultimatum; balance must be reinstated, and swiftly. They do not care which means are to be used and Jareth worries that if Sarah does not come into her own soon, he will be forced to _make_ her, if he even can. And then he worries that if he must take that course of action, she will hate him if she does not already. He has given her ample reason to.

Jareth supposes that he could cross the door's threshold himself and see what would happen.

The Winter King slips into the courtyard, the heart of the labyrinth, which still slumbers coated in frost. Long ago it had become a dreary place, haunted with memories of his Queen and the might-have-been's and the will-not-be's and the harsh reminder of what had happened all those years ago.

But there is still hope, something he is gradually getting better at spotting, and there is just a little bit of it left.

Snow and ice do not bother him as he lounges in the roots of her favorite peach tree—not when they had been there for so long. Not when they are his own and he had so long ago grown accustomed to their chill.

Eyes passive, jaw slackened, he stares wistfully into the branches of the ancient tree. Most of the blossoms are dead, shriveled brown husks of their former selves, but one—just one—stands out just the slightest bit. There, towards the middle of the tree, peeking out between twigs and snow, was the barest hint of a delicate pink. A faint blush, really, though it matched the color of the petals whenever the tree had last blossomed and the ones Sarah always managed to get tangled in her hair.

Her jumps to his feet, scanning the rest of the garden. Rose bushes by the walkway are just barely starting to perk up and turn a soft green color. The frost doesn't look _quite_ as thick on the stone bench as it had during his last visit.

Sarah's return had started something, all the way to the core of the labyrinth. Something welcome and new and bright and hopeful. Something wonderful.

The year is turning.

**A/N**

Bad writing and deus ex machinimas, ahoy!

I totally forgot this existed. Updates will still be sporadic and it may take me another three years, but I promise this will get finished eventually.


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